by Arta Barzanji
Alexandre Koberidze’s Dry Leaf (2025) was made at a familial scale: his father appears on screen; his brother’s score threads through the film with a quietly inquisitive pulse. It is also, crucially, shot on an old Sony Ericsson mobile phone—echoing the director’s debut feature—and that choice doesn’t sit in the background as trivia. It is the film’s fulcrum, the axis on which each aesthetic and narrative decision pivots.
We tend to flatten “resolution” into “quality,” as if the density of pixels could stand in for the value of an image. But “quality,” in the fuller sense that dictionaries still preserve, indicates character, property, attribute—the thing that makes a sensation unlike any other. The colloquial substitution of resolution for quality isn’t a pedant’s quibble; it registers the long standardization of film aesthetics under capitalist production. As commodities, films are streamlined toward uniform legibility: a house style of the visible. And yet art, even as a commodity, retains an older power—call it magic, or simply human expression—that resists complete assimilation to the standard.
Dry Leaf is a gentle crusade against that assimilation, not by rejecting cinema’s grammar but by estranging it. Koberidze respects codes like shot/reverse shot; he stages over-the-shoulder conversations and orients us with familiar angles. But seen through the stubborn grain of a low-resolution phone camera, these “invisible” conventions become newly visible. The standard frame starts to feel less like neutral delivery and more like a decision with stakes. This is estrangement by association: alter one parameter (resolution) and you wobble others (framing, cutting, rhythm), reminding us that stylistic elements never operate in isolation. To paraphrase Hegel, what’s real are not the things themselves, but their relations—between techniques within a film, and between this film and the historical paths adjacent forms have taken.
Dry Leaf’s strength lies in persistence rather than the escalation of ideas. It announces its conceptual gambit in the first thirty or so minutes and then—across nearly three hours—lets that wager endure. Trees, cows, hills, dogs, and football fields recur; elements that would ordinarily serve as establishing texture become the subject. At one point, the camera follows a white cow and a figure in red as they walk through a meadow. They recede, the light thins, and their edges dissolve into white and red smears across green. Abstraction emerges from figuration without postproduction tricks, just a function of distance, sensor, and dusk. Elsewhere, a slow zoom into a football pitch ends not in information but in pixels—an image atomized to the point where representation slips and we briefly watch color and light for themselves. The film teaches us to recognize that limit as part of cinema’s texture, not its failure. In a festival climate thick with feints toward big concepts, Dry Leaf’s stubbornness reads as bracingly honest: a filmmaker with one or two ideas, refusing to decorate them, trusting that reiteration will open a different mode of attention. In a line-up of films straining to flower, the quiet sight of a dry leaf can be the true revelation.
Locarno 78 offered Koberidze a companion in single-mindedness: Radu Jude’s Dracula (2025) is stubborn in a louder key. Where Dry Leaf builds a hermetic, minimalist fairytale playground for probing visibility and texture, Jude erects an AI-equipped laboratory to resurrect Dracula and run experiments on him. Characteristically, the film is crammed with references—ranging from goofy to vulgar—and it brims with child-like irreverence. Around Dr. Judex, Dracula’s diegetic AI, Jude devises an in-film apparatus that’s as investigatory as it is dramatic: as attuned to film history as to present technologies of vision, as specifically Romanian as it is brazenly global.
For all its overflow of ideas, stories, trends, diversions and citations, the movie orbits a simple, apt metaphor: AI as vampire, surviving only by sucking the blood of the living—our data, our images, our labor. If Dry Leaf plays its main notes in the first thirty minutes and sticks with them without blinking, Dracula riffs on the same note for its entire runtime while ceaselessly winking at you. Quiet versus loud temperaments aside, both works function as almost frustratingly stubborn anti-festival objects: they buck the trend of equating vagueness with profundity, of shying from assertions, of reverse-engineering “festival films,” of smelling like they were incubated to spec at workshops. Watched amid days of middling, highbrow self-seriousness, their one-note insistence lands like revelation—and it raises a question about afterlives. How will that insistence read outside the crucible of a festival? Paradoxically, each seems to wage a crusade against the festival while making a special kind of sense within it.
Let’s return from this diversion about a film full of diversions by discussing what Dry Leaf is about: the nominal story is disarmingly simple. Irakli (David Koberidze) is searching for his missing 28-year-old daughter, Lisa, who may have gone to the mountains to take photographs. Levan (Otar Nijaradze)—one of the film’s “unseeables”—joins the search. Along the way, they also ask about football stadiums. Motives are sparse; connections remain sketched. The ellipses aren’t coyness but a pace of life: recurring long shots of Irakli’s car gliding through the landscape (Kiarostami comes to mind) set the film’s metabolism. Urgency is banished not only from the plot but from movement, sound, and image. Irakli shows Lisa’s photo to villagers. Faces, fields, and roads accumulate, not as clues toward a climax but as time spent with a world.
Near the film’s outset, the narrator announces that “Levan, like some others in this film’s reality, is invisible. Right now, there are two people in the frame, but one of them can’t be seen.” Dry Leaf’s invisible characters extend Koberidze’s fairytale interests (explored more thoroughly in his last feature, What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (2021)) while prodding at our default realism. We hear them, others speak to them, frames are composed as though to include them—and yet they do not appear. This isn’t modernist refusal so much as mischievous pedagogy. By withholding one element of the standard package (visibility) while retaining others (sound cues, blocking, eye-lines), the movie reacquaints us with conventions as conventions. It says: here is how you’ve learned to believe an image; here is how belief might be re-tuned.
Amid this visual program, one question lingers: Was the sound recorded with the same phone? The audio often feels “normal,” which suggests a separate capture. If so, the film sharpens its theoretical edge: the friction between a rough image and a smoother track prompts us to audit our senses. We don’t just watch differently; we hear differently against what we see. The sensory mismatch becomes a tiny seminar on how “quality” is apportioned across the audiovisual unit, and how each channel conditions the other.
It matters, too, that Dry Leaf is a film of family and friends, of small means and exacting choices. The phone isn’t a gimmick; it’s a material condition turned into an aesthetic program. By holding to that program, Koberidze exposes the baseline we’ve rarely questioned: texture itself. Resolution doesn’t just modulate sharpness; it recalibrates our perception of color, movement, depth—the whole phenomenology of the shot. Once that becomes palpable, the standardized “high-quality” image starts to look like only one among many possible defaults.If the film can feel single-minded, that is part of its ethics; insisting—softly, stubbornly—until our habits loosen. By the end, the search for Lisa, the queries about stadiums, cows, pixels, and unseen companions, all resolve less into answers than into a renewed capacity to look and listen. In the context of the abundant gestures toward importance in Locarno’s lineup, Dry Leaf proposes a quieter test: can you dwell with an image until its relations declare themselves? Koberidze’s wager is that you can—and that, once you do, “quality” returns to its older meaning. Not a grade, not a spec sheet, but a character: a manner of showing, a way of seeing it.
Arta Barzanji is a London-based Iranian filmmaker, critic, and lecturer. He has written for publications including MUBI Notebook, photogėnie and Documentary Magazine. His current film project is the documentary Unfinished: Kamran Shirdel.
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