Dry Leaf

 

Director Alexandre Koberidze

camera on the set

DRY LEAF                B                                                                                                      Georgia  (186 mi)  2025  d: Alexandre Koberidze

Keep going straight to the end of the road and you’ll find it.

Intentionally shot blurry and slightly out of focus with an old 2008 Sony Ericsson W595 mobile phone that ceased production in 2011, much like his debut feature LET THE SUMMER NEVER COME AGAIN (2017), which was shot with the same camera, this long and meandering film, split into two parts, is a journey in itself, where it’s radically different than anything else you’ll see in theaters, requiring patience and an eye for detail, as we’re seeing everything with unspoiled eyes, like revisiting old photographs, where the one thing you learn here is that it’s not about the final destination, but about the journey itself.  The time spent with this film is an invaluable experience, as the continual blurriness alters our perspective, making us see things differently.  With compliments to Kiarostami’s WHERE IS MY FRIEND’S HOUSE? (1987) and his short film ROADS OF KIAROSTAMI (2005), much of this is spent in rural roadsides, off the beaten path, where the slower pace of life is simply different, becoming not just a road movie, but the inner journey of a man who unwittingly discovers himself, while at the same time it’s an investigative film that challenges the perceptions of viewers, becoming a meditation on Georgian life and landscapes, where at one point a worldly uncle recalls Georgia’s history of Soviet Occupation.  In this culture, it’s not uncommon to approach strangers, or visit unknown homes, where the greeting is always friendly, while in America these days, that kind of behavior could get you shot, as people are so distrustful and suspicious of strangers, yet in the 50’s and 60’s, even in America people left their doors unlocked, as there was no fear that anything bad would happen.  From the maker of 2022 Top Ten List #7 What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (2021), which was distinctly unique, where the connecting thread to this film is an obsessive passion with soccer, with an explicit homage to Messi, and by the end even Maradona appears.  The outstanding sound design and musical accompaniment is by the director’s brother Giorgi, who also scored his earlier film, a mix of electronic and classical tones, creating a leitmotif accompanying various moments of the journey, perfectly balancing the unique visual experience with an equally original musical counterpoint, where watching this is very much like watching a silent film.  Written, directed, edited, and shot by Koberidze, a director who has always displayed a predilection for acute observation, this is an impressionistic film to get immersed into, feeling like a transformative journey exploring the interaction between humans and their environment, featuring the heavy use of a storyteller-narrator, initially screening at the Locarno Film Festival, which is known for taking on more adventurous projects that mainstream festivals aren’t interested in, receiving a Jury special mention and the Fipresci prize, where you may not find anything else like this in your lifetime, so that by itself is invaluable.  Due to the extreme aesthetic, however, this will probably not be found in theaters and may only be shown at film festivals. 

Growing up in Tbilisi during the post-Soviet era, Georgian citizens often endured long periods of electricity blackouts, where just learning to survive was the main thing.  Graduating from the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin (DFFB), Koberidze contributes writings on cinema to various publications, actively engaging in film criticism and theory.  Like an experimental cinema exercise, the film’s hazy images evoke memories of another time, taking us into a place we’ve never been, challenging viewers in ways unlike other films, capturing the pre-smartphone mindset, when people had a tendency to look around more and actually see their environment, requiring a mental adjustment, where another connecting thread of all Koberidze’s films is that they are full of digressions.  Essentially a father, Irakli (the director’s father David Koberidze), scours the rural countrysides in his Subaru van in search of his missing daughter Lisa, a 28-year old sports photographer who was on assignment photographing abandoned football fields in small communities for a sports magazine, but who has gone missing, albeit intentionally, leaving a note behind not to worry, asking not to be followed, yet after a month passes without a word, fatherly impulses kick in as he tries to retrace her journey in search of football fields in rural villages across Georgia, many of which have been overgrown by wild grass.  A largely internalized journey, finding himself in the same places his daughter has been, the father astutely reflects, “Seeing the same things, even if not at the same time, is a kind of togetherness.”  With the help of the magazine editor Levani (Otar Nijaradze), who just happens to be invisible, yes, that’s right, invisible, as are many others in these remote communities who are questioned throughout the quest, heard but not seen, while others are completely visible, remaining something of a mystery for viewers, like a ghostly aspect, where the past mingles with the present in a relationship that suggests so much of our lives remains hidden and out of sight, even to us, where the past is simply forgotten.  In reference to the title, the director has acknowledged in the Director's Note, “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.”  Going further, “In the late 1950’s, Brazilian footballer Didi introduced a technique for kicking the ball called the ‘dry leaf.’  Just as a dry leaf falls from a tree and it’s impossible for the human eye to calculate where it will land, with this technique it’s impossible for the goalkeeper to predict the exact trajectory of the ball.  The thing is, it remains a mystery for the shooter as well.  Try to remember a leaf falling from above––how it changes direction and speed, sometimes dropping fast and straight to the ground, only for everything to shift suddenly.  It begins to hover slowly and calmly before changing its path again, and so on, depending on the height, the wind, the humidity, and countless other factors we’re not even aware of.  Even when it reaches the ground, the leaf’s journey isn’t over — a gust of wind or a little boy on his way to school might carry it to a different neighborhood, or someone might sweep it into a bag with thousands of other leaves and send it to a place where leaves are burned.”

The way the camera lingers over its subjects and its absurd use of humor recalls the great Georgian filmmaker Otar Iosseliani, maker of BRIGANDS: CHAPTER SEVEN (1996) and FAREWELL, HOME SWEET HOME (1999), who studied under the great Russian/Ukrainian director Alexander Dovzhenko, where repression under the Soviet regime caused him to eventually seek exile in France, as the lingering effect of Russian influence is an invisible force hovering over Koberidze’s films, where the past is always present.  Part of the director’s interaction with invisible characters came about as he was traveling through the rural areas and found it difficult to approach strangers to ask them to appear in his film, so the idea of invisibility allowed him to film more freely, unencumbered by added pressures.  Essentially a landscape road movie with various strangers appearing or interacting at different intervals along the way, as even the faces of the protagonists are a blur, blending into a constantly changing landscape, where the length of the film matters, as it allows viewers to adjust to the rhythms and idiosyncrasies of what they’re watching, using the camera as an unseen character, becoming a mesmerizing experience in the theater, as viewers never know what to expect.  As the scenery shifts from city to countryside, trees, grass, apples, as well as horses, donkeys, cows, cats, and dogs appear more frequently, producing entirely different sounds, like the chirping of birds, or the humming of insects, yet what drives the film is the element of surprise, the curiosity to unravel the family mystery and unlock just what happened to the missing daughter, where only fragments of her presence are detected, which may feel slight for a three-hour film, and it does get repetitive, but it’s a meandering journey that accentuates spontaneity in the moment, honing in on tiny details that would otherwise be easily overlooked, like a cup placed next to a waterfall to allow passers-by to drink.  The camera lingers on changing landscapes at different hours of the day, with varying shades of light, capturing empty fields, cows grazing, dilapidated goalposts, or none at all, while speaking to children playing football along the way, creating a temporal rhythm and visual texture that is entirely its own.  The emphasis on the ruins of goalposts mirrors the use of already obsolete camera technology, where the aesthetic matches the subject matter, as so much of our lives simply fades away over time.  With the destruction of soccer fields to make way for the construction of new hotels, “Where would you play after the football field is demolished?” a young boy is asked.  “Everywhere,” he responds enthusiastically.  Just when you think all hope is lost, a series of events mysteriously alter our perspective, with a resolution happening offscreen, suggesting not all mysteries need to be solved.  Literally defying trends in HD and 4K filmmaking, challenging the direction of where cinema is heading, this is radical yet old-school filmmaking, an immersive sensory experience that creeps up on you, providing a mirror of ourselves, as if existing between reality and a dream, recalling Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST LIVES (2010), with the camera essentially inhabiting the subjectivity of a ghostly state of mind.

Hale County This Morning, This Evening

 

Director RaMell Ross

HALE COUNTY THIS MORNING, THIS EVENING                  B                                          USA  (76 mi)  2018  d: RaMell Ross          

If we weren’t stuck in our first-person points of view, I would argue that most problems in the world that have to do with inequality would be solved, because we wouldn’t be stuck in our single points of views.                                                                                                                   —Director RaMell Ross                

Much has been written about this boldly impressionistic, kaleidoscopic film, which is largely a photographic exercise, basically confronting viewers to question what they see, documenting small-town life in rural Alabama, where the intent appears to be to break the mold and defy age-old stereotypical perceptions of black life by creating something new, where the filmmaker literally establishes his own uncompromising vision, which is more challenging for viewers.  Told in a non-linear fashion, for the most part, unbound by preconceived ideas on filmmaking, where a stereotypical myth of blackness is entangled at the root of the American South’s depiction, a mythology upheld in textbooks, institutions, media, film, and literature, evolving into fact and growing into laws, so the director treads new ground using a process that evolved organically through his personal engagement with the people and spaces of Hale County, Alabama, honoring its participants by resisting easy consumption, instead challenging our intellect with what has been described as a new aesthetic, offering a fresh and unpretentious take on an often overlooked part of American life, tucked out of sight, away from the distractions of media attention, where life and death exists here much as it did decades ago, with families and neighbors in close contact with one another, where there are literally no secrets, Independent Lens | Hale County This Morning, This Evening ... YouTube (2:09).  With no voice-overs or talking-head interviews, with an unobtrusive electronic musical score by Alex Somers and Scott Alario, the filmmaker utilizes landscape photography to allow nature to occasionally intrude.  What’s not shown and never mentioned is the long history of racial oppression, as this is a place where Martin Luther King sought refuge in a safe house from the Ku Klux Klan just two weeks before his assassination, now a Black History Museum in Greensboro, Safe House Black History Museum: Home, featuring endless acres of cotton fields, where poor white sharecropping families were once the subject of Walker Evans photographs in the 1941 book LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN, with a text by James Agee, capturing the lives of impoverished tenant farmers during the Great Depression, a book that inspired Aaron Copland’s 1954 opera The Tender Land.  But that was then and this is now, with the region currently populated largely by people of color, where dreams of a better life have more available options, but people are still economically stuck in a seemingly endless cycle of poverty, where the county’s median income is around $30,000, so progress is slow in coming, if at all, with many facing the same roadblocks preventing advancement, creating a cyclical Sisyphean feel, like a heavy weight of history being held over their heads.  Graduating with degrees in English and Sociology from Georgetown University, while also playing point guard on the basketball team until he was sidelined by injuries, earning a Master’s in Photography at the Rhode Island School of Design, currently working as an associate professor in Brown University’s Visual Art Department, Ross is a unique visual artist, awarded an Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship, a Rhode Island Foundation MacColl Johnson artist Fellowship, Howard Foundation Fellowship, USA Artist Fellowship, Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellow, and was a 2022 Solomon Fellow at Harvard University, with this film winning the 2018 Sundance U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Creative Vision, where his work has also been featured in various art museums.  While this film was nominated for an Academy Award in Documentary Film in 2018, the award was given to Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s FREE SOLO (2018), featuring the extraordinary, death-defying rock climbing skills without ropes or other protective equipment by Alex Honnold.   

Stylistically, Ross has developed his own signature experimental style that is not like other black filmmakers, as it doesn’t have the humanist, cinéma vérité aesthetic of Charles Burnett out of the UCLA L.A. Rebellion school of the 60’s and 70’s, perhaps best exemplified by Killer of Sheep (1979), which this film resembles, especially in its depiction of children, or Spike Lee’s tone of provocation in exploring the complexities of black cultural identity in America, like Do the Right Thing (1989), or the sensualized, poetic flair of Barry Jenkins’ 2016 Top Ten List #1 Moonlight, whose films owe a debt of influence to Asian filmmaker Wong Kar-wai.  More than the others, this has the abstract, experimental style of Jean-Luc Godard, as it emphasizes an analytic, intellectual aspect of filmmaking that can feel obtuse and unapproachable, as the style itself is distancing, leaving viewers to reflect as much on the visual aesthetic as the subject matter, where the film is a counterpoint to the politicization of people of color and the entertainment industry’s idealizations of black life.  Ross shows blackness in a way that has rarely been depicted onscreen, with an unsentimentalized focus on emotions and perceptions as opposed to narrative actions, experimenting with form, literally creating a new cinematic language, with creative consultation from Apichatpong Weerasethakul, with his blend of naturalism and poetic realism, maker of SYNDROMES AND A CENTURY (2006), UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST LIVES (2010), the somnambulistic Cemetery of Splendor (Rak ti Khon Kaen) (2015), or more recently 2022 Top Ten List #3 Memoria (2021).  The director spent five years shooting, moving to Greensboro, Alabama in 2009 to teach photography and coach high school basketball, where he didn’t initially think of shooting a film, but was simply photographing things of interest before deciding to shoot on a DSLR video camera, accumulating an astonishing 1300 hours of footage, pared down to just 76-minutes by Ross and three others in the editing room, making this a deliberately impressionistic and exploratory film, reminiscent of the quasi-experimental work of Terrence Malick’s later films, 2011 Top Ten Films of the Year #1 The Tree of Life (2011), To the Wonder (2012),  Knight of Cups (2015), and Song to Song (2017).  What’s perhaps surprising about this documentary is that it appears to be guided by mundane moments, following multiple protagonists over the course of several years, where sometimes they speak directly into the camera, and sometimes they are simply being observed, using a fly on the wall approach, capturing life as it is being lived, offering no sociological or philosophical conclusions, with little that might seem special or out of the ordinary, which viewers may find challenging in holding our attention, as it’s difficult to sell the banal, yet these are simply moments that most blacks will recognize as having lived through, and there is something deeply meaningful in the personalized way that it is shown.  Entertaining it is not, however, and viewers may find themselves easily distracted and confused by the Godardian dialectic, which is simply not for everyone, as many of the characters are difficult to understand, where it seemingly jumps around at random, with no coherent message, immersing viewers into the connected lives of various black individuals and families in the community, perhaps insisting that we view them on their own terms without filters or bias.  Curiously, in the only artificial, non-natural inclusion, the film also includes archival clips from the 1913 silent film, LIME KILN CLUB FIELD DAY, the first feature to star a black actor, in this case black entertainer Bert Williams in blackface, a popular silent era comedian who played the vaudeville circuit, like a ghost of cinema’s past, using intentionally off-putting moments that remind us of the origins of black representation in cinema, probing how blackness has come to be seen by large viewing audiences, introducing historical questions of ethical concerns. 

Hale County is named in honor of Confederate officer Stephen Fowler Hale, established at the end of the Civil War, with whites controlling much of the economic and political power in the county, enforced early by violence and later by decades of disenfranchisement of black voters through a statewide imposition of Jim Crow laws that were not overturned until after 1965, leaving behind a legacy of segregation and economic stagnation, with more than 25% of the population today living below the poverty line, where most everyone seems to end up working in the refrigerated conditions of a catfish processing plant.  Poetically addressing the region’s shift in demographics and the power that lies within the community in purely human terms, Ross, whose presence is occasionally seen or heard, focuses his attention on two young high school students he met while working as a teacher and basketball coach, Quincy Bryant, a struggling young father, along with his wife Latrenda “Boosie” Ash, who is pregnant with twins, and their energetic young child Kyrie, and Daniel Collins, raised by his grandmother until he was 12, as his mother’s boyfriend had “an attitude problem,” who dreams of playing in the NBA, with only one of them making it to college, able to seek out new opportunities at Selma University, a historically black college, while the other finds himself saddled by the responsibilities of a growing family, with each flowing in and out of the frame.  Using onscreen intertitles, like chapter headings, they pose poetic and philosophically thoughtful questions that aren’t immediately answerable, but offer a literary provocation of setting a mood, like “What is the orbit of our dreaming?”  “How do we not frame someone?”  “Where does time reside?” Ross captures ordinary scenes in a series of tableaux shots, exposing brief vignettes in time, like a slow-motion drive down a heavily populated main street awaiting a parade, the camera fixed straight ahead, or a student’s perspective of a classroom discussion, the unbridled enthusiasm of a child gleefully running back and forth between the living room and hallway, the hypnotic singing and bodies swaying at church, basketball and cheerleading practice, storm clouds and rain, kids playing in the streets, a nose piercing, a birthing scene, the joy of shooting off fireworks, a smoke-filled burning of tires, watching the sunlight filtering through the trees, a bee turning in circles in the back of a truck, and even a fast food drive-through, where voices are heard in the background, but rarely seen, keeping viewers off-balance, accentuated by odd camera angles that are equally unexpected.  While a shocking tragedy occurs, it is viewed as part of the everyday moments of the human experience, receiving no extra attention, with Ross respectfully observing in an understated and minimally invasive manner.  A collection of jagged, fleeting moments, the black experience has rarely, if ever, been shown this way, as it never shows important decisions being made, with only a few impactful moments, so it doesn’t allow viewers to cast judgment on what they see, but it does allow them to feel the fragility of the interpersonal relationships, where one glaring observation is just how much this film emphasizes youth, making them an essential component of the community, as they represent the future.  These young protagonists are not yet adults, yet they’re already playing adult roles, growing up too soon, where Daniel’s mother Mary can actually be heard telling her son that he is spending too much time with her, that she’s tired from all her many obligations, and needs her own space.  This is simply not what we’re typically used to hearing, or seeing, but it offers a powerful reflection on what a hard life it is being black, as it wears you out, physically and emotionally, as you’re challenged and tested on a daily basis for your entire lifespan.  It may come as a bit of a shock, with no real success stories to speak of, instead there are shared moments that collectively have a value, where the impact is internalized, with this filmmaker envisioning a new way of seeing a connection to an identifiable black consciousness, providing some of the most intimate glimpses, with viewers slowly coming to the realization why they matter, with the music of Billie Holiday providing the final grace note over the end credits, Billie Holiday: Stars Fell On Alabama (1957) YouTube (3:50).