By certain measures, it has never been easier to make a film. Cameras are more accessible than ever: smaller, cheaper, more portable and powerful. Over the past decade the phone—the word we still use for what is now chiefly a conduit of AI slop and misinformation, an instrument for doomscrolls and dopamine hits—has assumed prominence as a tool of feature filmmaking. This development dates more or less to the 2015 launch of Apple’s “Shot on iPhone” campaign, a promotional barrage of user-generated imagery meant to alert consumers to the state-of-the-art technology in their pockets. That same year the American independent filmmaker Sean Baker premiered his comedy caper Tangerine, shot on an iPhone 5s, at Sundance, aligning the emerging category of the cell phone movie with a tradition of scrappy, low-budget ingenuity. Steven Soderbergh, himself synonymous with an earlier era of indie resourcefulness, followed suit, shooting Unsane (2018) on the iPhone 7 Plus and High Flying Bird (2019) on the iPhone 8.
Some of today’s most interesting films are shot on such devices, under circumstances that corroborate their all-purpose convenience and utility. The Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude was preparing his iPhone-shot Dracula (2025)—an elaborate riff on Transylvanian vampire lore that both uses and skewers AI—when he realized he could stretch his resources to make a whole other feature and threw together a complex moral drama, Kontinental ’25 (2025), with much of the same cast and crew, also shot on an iPhone.1 Julia Loktev was doing research for her documentary My Undesirable Friends (the first part of which appeared in 2024), about the last remaining independent journalists in Moscow before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but events moved so quickly that her trip, which she was shooting with an iPhone, turned into the film itself, which comes to demonstrate the equipment’s aptness for intimate vérité observation. On most professional shoots a phone camera would be supplemented with lenses, stabilizers, and ancillary gear—or, in the case of Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later (2025), up to twenty iPhones could be marshaled into service at once. But the point stands that the means to make a movie—once cumbersome and expensive—now fits in the palm of your hand.
If that notion has an appealing, democratic ring, it also echoes the myth of availability on which capitalism relies—the promise of infinite choice that, for practical purposes, is no choice at all. Phone cameras are compact and relatively affordable, but they also flatten the filmmaker’s range of visual options. They rely on algorithmic processes that smooth and sharpen the image, in effect enforcing a default contemporary aesthetic that favors smoothness and sharpness. “We cannot improve the making of our eyes but we can endlessly perfect the camera,” the Soviet revolutionary filmmaker Dziga Vertov wrote over a century ago. These days this pursuit of perfection takes the form of an arms race toward maximum hyperreal clarity, a mode of vision beyond the capabilities of the naked eye. Cameras now deploy ever higher frame rates, as seen in the uncanny sheen of blockbusters by James Cameron and Peter Jackson, and films are shot, shown, and restored on ever higher resolutions (4K, 8K, and beyond).
The tools of cinema change quickly, often comprehensively. Technology has replaced the medium’s material substrate—once photochemical, now primarily electronic—and repeatedly modified its syntax, its narrative codes, its standards of realism. Filmmakers, perhaps more than most artists, are bound to the tools of their age, so it is always notable when they try to resist or even reverse technology’s march. One much-publicized current example is the return of VistaVision, a film format that gets extra resolution out of 35mm film by running it through the camera horizontally rather than vertically. Popular in 1950s Hollywood, it lay more or less dormant for more than sixty years until resurrected by Paul Thomas Anderson, Brady Corbet, and a few other directors. But there are also filmmakers who prize obsolescent technologies precisely for their apparent shortcomings. David Lynch shot his final feature, Inland Empire (2006), with a prosumer digital camera whose murky images afford, in Lynch’s words, more “room to dream.” Sadie Benning and Michael Almereyda have found ghostly, evocative textures using Pixelvision, a Fisher-Price toy camera from the late 1980s. Then there is the curious case of the Georgian director Alexandre Koberidze, who shot his latest feature, Dry Leaf, with the camera of a nearly twenty-year-old mobile phone.
The Sony Ericsson W595, which Koberidze has now used to film two features, was introduced in 2008, a year after the first iPhone. A slider phone with a concealed keyboard, it was part of Sony Ericsson’s Walkman range, vaunted for its ease of music playback. (The range was phased out in the early 2010s; these days the W595s can be found on eBay for about fifty dollars apiece.) Contemporaneous reviews note its limited camera function: no flash, no autofocus, poor performance under low light. The W595 shoots video at fifteen frames per second—producing a choppier moving image than the customary twenty-four frames per second, deemed the minimum for perceived smoothness of motion—and a maximum resolution of 240 pixels, which is to say its images contain at least eighty times less visual information than the current 4K standard.
Even at the time it would have been inconceivable to use a camera like this, with its weak sensors and puny pixel counts, for any professional video production, let alone to shoot an entire feature film. (“We’re not keen to push this handset on video-lovers,” the tech site CNET noted.) In Blur, the latest in the Cutaways series of monographs on cinematic motifs from Fordham University Press, the scholar Martine Beugnet writes that “an unexpectedly blurry image draws attention to the workings of the camera; it risks undoing the illusion of reality.”2 But what if a film consists wholly of blurry images?
In outline, Dry Leaf—the third feature by Koberidze, who was born in Tbilisi in 1984—is simple, indeed archetypal: a road movie, a quest narrative, in which a father travels the length and breadth of Georgia in search of his adult daughter, a sports photographer who has left home for reasons unknown. When Irakli (played by David Koberidze, the filmmaker’s father) learns that Lisa was shooting rural soccer fields for a recent project, he goes on a meandering cross-country journey, driving from one sleepy mountain village to another, hoping to find some trace of her. Joining him is Levan, a colleague of Lisa’s who accompanied her on an earlier scouting trip. As befits a film that throws into doubt the notion that seeing is believing, Levan is invisible—“like many others in this film’s reality,” according to a matter-of-fact voice-over.
Koberidze has never shied from the fantastical: his previous feature, What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (2021), hinges on the overnight physical transformation of its star-crossed lovers, who wake up as different people, no longer able to recognize each other. He has a taste for folklore and whimsy, which one might connect to the oral traditions of Georgian literature, or to the absurdist lyricism of Otar Iosseliani, one of his country’s most beloved filmmakers (for his part, Koberidze has credited his grandmother’s bedtime stories). Titled after a Brazilian soccer term for a type of kick that lands unpredictably, Dry Leaf proceeds with an expectant fairy-tale air. The possibility of enchantment is always near at hand.
The source of the magic is not exactly the narrative, which consists almost exclusively of Irakli’s encounters with locals, some of them—we realize when we see him addressing empty space—invisible. He shows each one a photo of Lisa, which the audience never sees, and it rings no bells. A few meetings spark digressive reminiscences: a man gives a tour of a now abandoned community-center-cum-cinema that he’s fixing up (the ambience recalls Esther Kinsky’s recent autobiographical novel Seeing Further, about an attempt at reanimating a derelict Hungarian movie theater3); a nonagenarian uncle of Irakli’s summons tales of boyhood as if they happened yesterday. Because Lisa has sent a letter to her parents assuring them she is safe, the search progresses with a minimum of urgency.
This often wordless film finds its meaning and complexity elsewhere. Far more prominent than dialogue or voice-over are birdsong, herding bells, and a plaintive electroacoustic score by the composer Giorgi Koberidze, the director’s brother, who also worked on the sound recording and design. Dry Leaf lingers at length on landscapes, on their flora and fauna, on the weather and light conditions that determine their legibility before the gaze of an easily overwhelmed camera. These soft, vague images are so distant from contemporary photographic realism that, for many, the reference that will first spring to mind is painting. Koberidze encourages this comparison with a few still lifes, directing our attention to, say, a plate of apples or a handful of freshly picked apricots. The landscapes at times evoke Impressionist and Post-impressionist vistas, the practically countable pixels suggesting the visible brushstrokes of impasto.
Some critics writing about Dry Leaf have used the term “poor image” to characterize the Sony Ericsson’s unstable smear—a nod to the artist and theorist Hito Steyerl’s influential 2009 essay “In Defense of the Poor Image.” For Steyerl, the degraded electronic image—which she also terms the “Wretched of the Screen,” “a lumpen proletarian in the class society of appearances”—is emblematic of an age of audiovisual detritus, and the unsanctioned digital circulation of such images has emancipatory potential, broadening the pool of potential makers, viewers, and remixers, for better or worse.
But Koberidze is not defending the poor image so much as rejecting the term entirely. Even before Steyerl’s piece, the low-resolution digital image was a dubious signifier of authenticity, often wedded to the trope of handheld shakiness, as in the films of the Dogme 95 movement, asserting on-the-fly immediacy and a subjective presence behind the camera. Dry Leaf works against this logic. Koberidze’s lowly cell phone is mounted to a tripod, and he frames and pans with compositional care. A tension develops between the camera’s feebly defined images and the cinematography’s classical elegance. Having seen this movie in various settings, I can confirm that to watch it on a laptop is to collapse the gap that gives it much of its power.
Experienced as cinema, every frame of Dry Leaf enacts a drama of form. Figure and ground lose their distinctness. A smudge turns out to be a person, who seems to vanish before our eyes as they recede toward the horizon only to reappear moments later. Clouds take on serrated edges; power cables resemble dotted lines. The pixel, an unwanted video artifact, becomes a compositional element, a visible unit of information that periodically fills the screen with grids and gradients. Even apparently static shots are alive with contingency. Scenes in which nothing much happens are in fact trembling battles between darkness and light, as the camera struggles to adapt to its environment. The throbbing lag of the image, a result of digital compression, comes to seem like the very pulse of the movie, its electronic heartbeat. In its lack of nuance and tendency to overcorrect, the color range produces striking, often beautiful distortions: radioactive sunsets, a golden-hour glow. Paradoxically, the lo-fi aesthetic betrays a sensitivity to the atmospheric, or at least a compatibility with the gaseous and liquid states that Koberidze keeps returning to: the ever-present fog and mist of mountain terrain, the incessant flows of streams and waterfalls.
Koberidze has said that shooting with this humble camera helped train his cinematographic eye. Watching Dry Leaf, we realize it is also retraining us in the perceptual and cognitive processes of watching a movie. Our eyes adjust, and so do our assumptions about how movies make meaning and what is worth noticing in them. A blooming patch of sunlight is a potential event, as is the wind as it conspires with grass and leaves to create rhythmic patterns of shadow and light. Under these reimagined rules of cinematic engagement, the most rudimentary decisions can engender extraordinary effects. At one point an extreme zoom-in blows out the screen, turning it into an ominous void of pixelated visual noise. At another Koberidze conjures a veritable fantasia simply by showing us the view from inside Irakli’s car as it is being washed, the pooling suds on the windows and windshield seeming to melt and peel away the very skin of the movie.
This mode of attention is reflexive: we notice our noticing, become aware of how this film about looking undoes our own ways of seeing. In Dry Leaf, seeing is, to a considerable extent, imagining, requiring us to fill in details that the image lacks. “The more you remove,” as Koberidze put it in a recent interview, “the more that remains for the spectator.” Our minds open, we become suggestible; we may even start seeing things. If we look closely enough, might the invisible characters materialize? Could the missing Lisa appear?
Twice, early in the film, Irakli, who teaches at a sports academy, stands before a blackboard. The first time, he speaks about the “crucial meaning” of the line; the second time, he says something similar about the circle. On both occasions a bell rings, ending the class before he can elaborate, but this enigmatic geometry lesson conditions us to see lines and circles everywhere: in the electrical poles, picket fences, and various man-made forms intruding on the natural world; in the intricate designs of a wrought-iron window, the distinctive curlicues of the Mkhedruli script, the perfectly straight body of a gymnast on the rings, the dimensions and delineations of a soccer pitch. One loses count of all the goalposts in Dry Leaf: frames within the frame, boundaries for rules and potential fictions. Circles and lines come to mind, too, in the movement of Koberidze’s story, in Irakli and Levan’s journey from one site to another, and eventually back home to Tbilisi, where they started.
Dry Leaf takes its place within a lineage of narrative films in which the landscape, far more than backdrop, becomes a repository of meaning, whether it’s the Monument Valley of John Ford or the northern Iranian countryside of Abbas Kiarostami (the recurring shots of Irakli’s vehicle traveling along winding mountain roads are essentially Kiarostami homages). The political potential of cinematic landscapes is the basis of fukeiron, or landscape theory, articulated by a group of Japanese filmmakers and critics in the late 1960s and put into practice in Masao Adachi’s documentary AKA Serial Killer (1969), which recounts the life of a teenage murderer through images of the locations he traversed, in order to reveal the systems of power inscribed in those landscapes. The urban spaces, industrial zones, and transportation and infrastructure networks of postwar Japan, in their stifling banality and uniformity, come to seem like clues to the mindset of the young man who killed four people in four cities with a handgun stolen from a US Army base.
Various strains of experimental cinema encourage this way of seeing, from the structuralist Americana of James Benning to the essayistic psychogeography of Patrick Keiller. Dry Leaf is less overt in its politics, but it, too, urges us to contemplate both what is plain to the eye and what may not be. Invisibility and disappearance figure into the film not just in the unseen characters of Lisa and Levan but in its depopulated villages and vanishing soccer fields (one of which, we hear, is being razed to build a hotel). There is a mention of the cost-of-living crisis that forced Lisa to move in with her parents, an acknowledgment of the interrelated upheavals in Georgia that have coincided with the ruling party’s intensifying pro-Russia stance and slide toward autocracy; Koberidze, like many Georgian artists, has been active in the antigovernment protests that have taken place daily in Tbilisi since the fall of 2024.
That said, the quality of attention that Dry Leaf prompts is not mainly analytic. Inviting sensory attunement at times, ethereal drift at others, the film is an inducement to wonder. It is significant that the two touchstones that Koberidze has most often cited for this film are associated, at least nominally, with children. The first is Hedgehog in the Fog (1975), a ten-minute classic of cut-out, stop-motion Soviet animation by Yuri Norstein that sends an intrepid hedgehog on an existential odyssey through dense fog, where he encounters all manner of marvels and threats, most memorably an imposing white horse. The second is Platero and I, a 1914 work of prose poetry by Juan Ramón Jiménez, a Spanish Nobel laureate, relatively little known in the US although a common school assignment in the Spanish-speaking world. Named for the narrator’s silver-gray donkey, Jiménez’s sad, surpassingly tender book, told in short vignettes, is foremost an account of the profound mutual bond between man and beast. (“He is so like me, so different from others, that I have come to believe he dreams my own dreams,” the narrator says of Platero.) Dry Leaf is the kind of film that pauses to acknowledge every dog, cat, donkey, horse, and cow that crosses its path.
In its sincere curiosity, its regard for all living things, one is tempted to impute to the movie the impressionable openness of childhood experience. Relevant perhaps is an oft-quoted maxim from the American avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage, who used rapid montage, complex exposures, and hand-painted emulsion to approximate modes of apprehension that he saw as prelinguistic and infantile: “How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of ‘Green’?” Dry Leaf is certainly, to use another Brakhage phrase, “an adventure of perception.” But unlike most avant-gardists, including Brakhage, for whom narrative is a crutch or contaminant, Koberidze is also deeply interested in story and its lures, even if he shrugs off many of contemporary cinema’s storytelling dictates.
In every quivering frame, Dry Leaf poses a question about how much information an image needs. At the same time, the film as a whole seems to wonder how much information a story needs. The pleasurable, mind-expanding placidity of Dry Leaf makes me think of the great Argentinian filmmaker Lucrecia Martel’s argument that narrative cinema relies too much on conflict, a staple of fiction workshops and especially of screenwriting classes. For Martel conflict, as a way of organizing and understanding the world, is both bellicose and inadequate: “Can the structure of conflict explain the extraordinary things that happen to us?” she asked in a recent lecture.
To rethink the obligations of narrative cinema, Koberidze has often looked to silent cinema for inspiration; more specifically, he has sought to complicate the relationship between what we see and what we hear. His first feature, Let the Summer Never Come Again (2017)—completed when he was a student at the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin, and also shot in large part on the Sony Ericsson phone—is a queer romance. We know this, however, only because of an omniscient voice-over that describes what transpires between the two male protagonists, who inhabit a lively city symphony of Tbilisi, seen apart and together but never in intimate situations. Dry Leaf harks back to early cinema in the imperfections of its image, invoking the flicker of low frame rates and inconsistent shutter mechanisms. It also orchestrates a sly and sustained decoupling of image and sound, picking apart the habitual relations between eye and ear that have taken hold over a century of talking pictures. Since the onset of synchronized sound, it has been customary for the faces of speaking characters to be discernible. Dry Leaf drolly disregards this convention; the characters here don’t even require material form to have a voice.
Giorgi Koberidze’s score, adapted from his recent album Forests, Tales, Cities, Forests (2025), combines electronics with traditional instruments from the Caucasus. As the film goes on it becomes an insinuating force in its own right, sometimes undergirding the image and sometimes floating free from it, making us realize how acutely our response to the one shapes our sense of the other. (Attesting perhaps to the music’s synesthetic capacity to generate its own images, the album premiered at a movie theater with a blank screen.) More than granting primacy to music, Alexandre Koberidze dares to use its abstraction as a foundational element: he has described his next film, a love story called Bilingual, as being “about the mood” of the 1996 Pet Shop Boys album of the same name.
Dry Leaf is a bet as well as an experiment. Koberidze’s wager is that these blurred images, to twenty-first-century eyes accustomed to the crisp edges of high definition, will be not just sufficient but replenishing. The film has become something of a darling of critics and cinephiles, surely in part because it provides a respite from the flood of visual information that swamps us daily, from images that are ugly in every conceivable way. In this respect Dry Leaf seems to long for simpler times, but Koberidze is not just a nostalgist. He wants to evoke a more expansive moment in cinema’s evolution, before the medium’s range of formal and narrative possibilities narrowed. In one of the movie’s defining moments, Irakli asks an invisible child where he plays soccer now that the local field is gone. The answer: “Everywhere.”
English (US) · 