Dry Leaf [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
interview : Alexandre Koberidze
fiche film] marks Georgian director Alexandre Koberidze’s first Locarno premiere and sees him return to the form of his first feature, Let the Summer Never Come Again [+lire aussi :
bande-annonce
fiche film], a love story shot with a Sony Ericsson phone camera. Circling back to lo-fi aesthetics after the gorgeous 16 mm, Berlinale-awarded 2020 film What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
interview : Alexandre Koberidze
fiche film], Koberidze talked to Cineuropa about the reasons for, and the stakes of, making Dry Leaf – a father’s journey in search of his missing daughter and an ode to disappearing places.

Cineuropa: When you tell the origin story of your films, you usually mention a moment of inspiration in a mundane situation. When did Dry Leaf come to you as an idea?
Alexandre Koberidze: In 2020, at the start of the pandemic. I had been working on post-production for What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? in Berlin, and upon coming to Georgia, I had to stay in a quarantine hotel. I spent two weeks in a room with no phone and a broken laptop, so I started writing. It happened three times actually, and in those six weeks, I wrote the script for Dry Leaf.

At what point did you decide to use a Sony Ericsson to shoot?
I already knew it when I was shooting my previous film. It’s very nice to be with people, to talk to the cinematographer and to decide things together, but I also enjoy not having to explain anything. It’s the same for me in real life: I like to be around people; I also like to be alone.

Dry Leaf is a road trip through Georgia, but if there was a map of the character’s journey, what would it look like?
It was only the three of us – myself, the actor who drove us, and my brother, who recorded the sound – and we had several shoots, in 2022 and 2023. We were in different places, but often, we were shooting the same things. But if you follow the journey in real life as it is in the film, it wouldn’t make sense. Actually, that was a big question during the editing process: what can the logic be of placing one scene after another? How should I build it? At first, I thought I should make the journey geographically accurate, but I ended up placing things together more or less chronologically, which doesn't make any sense, geographically.

The movie has a feeling of atemporality to it, but its attention to empty spaces and lost places (the football fields that have disappeared, the demolished university) seems equally important. Why is that?
Even when I started making the film, I felt that I was already late. Maybe five or ten years ago, many of those football fields would still have existed. I sometimes felt like we were going through the ruins of civilisation. But even if I am late, I still want to capture something that’s slipping away. That was also our motivation in choosing locations: when we felt that a place we drove through would already be different on our way back. I’m also thinking about my next film, which I want to shoot on 16 mm, to capture things that won't be there any more – not only as a story, but as a [material] piece of art.

You also shot your first feature on a Sony Ericsson, but was there something about its limitations that you found newly liberating now?
If I work with a high-definition camera, I try not to shoot faces, at least not those of the people who are not involved in the film. The human face holds so many stories, so many things nobody else knows, and when filming, that is impossible to convey – you’re only showing a little part of it, using the shapes of their bodies or faces as a model, while their past remains hidden. But with the Sony Ericsson camera, you can really only show shapes and colours. I felt like I could film the people from the villages without taking something away from them.

Was the sound set-up as lo-fi as the camera set-up? The texture of the sound suggests so.
I had already tried in my first film to use good-quality sound with lower-quality images, but the sound was overpowering, so I ended up recording the sound on the phone. For Dry Leaf, we recorded at a higher quality, but we reworked it in post-production, as well as the music, which is a vital part of the soundscape. The music helped me build the dramaturgy, and this is why I say that this is our film [mine and my brother’s], because its music and images have the same importance.