Lisa, a photographer, has gone missing. The last known detail is that she had been photographing rural football stadiums in villages across Georgia. Her father, Irakli, sets out to search for her, traveling from place to place. Levani, Lisa's best friend – and an invisible person – also sets off to help.
EN
“In football, a ‘dry leaf’ is a kick with an unpredictable landing of the ball – much like our characters who surrender to the journey and trust the wind to lead them.”
Aleksandre Koberidze1
Omar Franini: Football has always been present in your movies. And there is also, if I can say that, an evolution in the way you implement it in your films. Because if I look at What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? and Dry Leaf, I feel there’s a different way you use the sport.
Alexandre Koberidze: I think it’s more like a feeling, about slowly understanding what is interesting for you in life. And also, while making films, realize that the things you appreciate or love in your real life, they can become part of your work, or maybe they should. For me, this wasn’t so clear in the beginning, when I first started thinking about making films. Because you can make a film about anything. And I don’t know, when you watch films, maybe you’re driven by a certain genre, or by very fictional stories that don’t have much to do with yourself. But quite soon it became clear to me that if I want to make a film that should be passionate for someone else, then I should be passionate about it myself. And maybe I should work with things that are important and dear to me. And definitely, I think football is one of those things. So, it makes sense to bring it in. And of course, once you do, it gives you a lot of possibilities… to create stories around it.
Omar Franini in conversation with Alexandre Koberidze2
Jordan Cronk: I’m curious about the documentary elements in the film. In most cases, are these real people you met in each village? And as far as the conversations, are you asking them to discuss their own lives, or did you have particular topics or subjects you wanted to touch on?
Koberidze: It’s a mix. When I wrote the screenplay, all the dialogue was scripted. All the stuff at beginning, with the family and police and people in the town, that’s all scripted, because we needed to get the story set up. I thought once we were on the road that I would meet many people, and we would talk to them to see what they bring, but quite soon I got really uncomfortable with this. You know, people are living their lives and you come and try to have them do stuff for you. I was really embarrassed by this approach. I was really struggling, and at some point I said, “Why torture myself if I’m uncomfortable? Let’s find another way.” And the solution was that sometimes, when things happened naturally, I would go with it. But it’s not that we were really looking for these encounters. Sometimes people would come and start talking by themselves, then maybe at some point I would ask, “Can I film you?”
But I also changed things. For example, near the end, I had written in this part where Irakli meets this kid who tells him that there’s no soccer fields around anymore. But I changed it to be an invisible kid, which was calming for me, in that I could say, “Okay, we won’t bother people here; we’ll just do the scene with an invisible kid.” This way I didn’t feel forced to find people everywhere we went. For the invisible characters, I would film my father saying his lines and the rest, the responses, I knew we would do in post production. This idea freed me.
Jordan Cronk in conversation with Alexandre Koberidze3
- 1Aleksandre Koberidze, Director's Note.
- 2Omar Franini, “What Do We See When We Look at the Football Field?: Alexandre Koberidze on Dry Leaf,” In Review Online, 15 August 2025.
- 3Jordan Cronk, ““A Desperate Search For a Reason to Wake Up”: Alexandre Koberidze on Dry Leaf,” Filmmaker Magazine, 2 September 2025.
