Director Alexandre Koberidze returns to screens with his second film shot entirely on a Sony Ericsson W595. Dry Leaf, his latest reflection on abstraction, tracks the search for a missing person. Lisa, who photographs football fields, has run away from her life and family without explanation. Her father, Irakli, accompanied by an invisible man, Levan, would like to find her.

With a resilient pulse, Dry Leaf drifts from place to place in a fuzzy haze. Light moves slowly as Irakli, played by the filmmaker’s father, and Levan, sweep the Georgian countryside. Through the gaze of Koberidze’s low-resolution camera, pastures begin to look like paintings. 

An enigmatic festival favourite, this blues-ey road movie has become a darling among critics since its arrival at Locarno last year. Attending the most recent festival, Charles Carrall called Koberidze in anticipation of his film’s theatrical release in Australia. Exactly a year after it debuted in the main competition, they discuss Dry Leaf, its many mysteries, gardening, and talking to the emptiness.

Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

I keep returning to this feeling that your film is some kind of work of jazz, probably because of how spontaneous it feels. Could you talk to me a little bit about what was intended and what wasn't for Dry Leaf?

Well, in the beginning, when I started to work on the film, I had quite a clear and strict script. But then, starting to film, this wish became less and less interesting. It slowly became more and more clear that maybe the right way of doing the film was to follow the road and see what can happen. I also read this book about a Japanese farmer who makes his gardens without traditional cultivation. He basically plants everything he needs, and then he says that you can trust the land and the plants, that they know better how to divide the space between themselves, and so on. In the end, he says he mostly has better results than his neighbours who follow very traditional methods. This kind of clicked when I thought, maybe I can also trust the medium which I'm working with; follow it and see what can come, and that's how it went. 

There were maybe a few things we knew, like for example we always asked where a football stadium was in each of the villages. This was leading us through the regions where we were. 

And then the next question we developed through our journey was to ask for some water springs, because you know there are some moments in the film where they where they are drinking water.

You were leading the horse to water.

These main two questions were leading us through space. And once we would go somewhere, then we would start to think about what we can make there.

You spoke about the medium, and I'm sure you've spoken at length about why you shot this film like you did your first feature Let the Summer Never Come Again (2017), but I’m curious about the intermission. Why did you choose to return to the Sony Ericsson W595 and the images that it could create?

It was actually after the first one that it was really hard to switch back to a higher resolution. Because I worked on the first film for a few years, I got used to this kind of–it's a kind of protection. You are protected against seeing too much or seeing the details you don't want to see. [With What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?] I was really shocked to get this material where you have more on your screen than what is in reality. With the cinematographer, we had a lot of discussions about how to escape this or how to hide things while filming my second film. I started to miss this camera, this feeling.

There are two components. On one hand, it's the way of working that I really started to miss; that I'm kind of alone, that I am the one who is holding the camera, and that we don't talk about what we're doing. It's very interesting to talk and work with other people, but when you discuss every idea, you say “I want to put the camera here”, then maybe you have to discuss why. And here it doesn't happen. It's very fast work. You never think twice. Also, when you work with a big crew. Any little decision has to make sense. Because the camera is big; it needs three people to move it. So everything is planned, and there are almost no spontaneous decisions. Here it was only spontaneity, and I really, really missed this. The other layer is, of course, what this camera is giving you, how the film looks. In the time between my first and the third film, I'm changing, and I had a lot of time to somehow watch the first film and to understand what I would do differently, maybe better.

I find it striking that Irakli and Levan’s search for Lisa surrounds a visual project — one where she photographs football fields. It may seem obvious to point out, but it’s fitting that Dry Leaf should piggy-back and almost become this project, as you inevitably found yourself photographing these fields. In your mind, why would Lisa lose herself to this pursuit?

It's a good question, but I don't know the exact answer. 

When I started to write, in the very early versions, there was this Lisa who just disappears. Again we knew what she was looking for, but there was no letter from her. She was just gone and they didn’t know why. 

At some point, I realised that it was too dramatic. I think it's because there were two cases discussed publicly in Georgia [at the time]. The first was a young woman who disappeared, it was on TV and everywhere for a few weeks, people were looking for her, and then there was another boy. I realised that it was a completely different subject. It's a tragedy, and it's the hardest time for a family when someone is gone and you don't know what happened. It's a subject for itself. I knew that if I would go for that, that this would completely limit me. I would have to stay serious and think through this prism of tragedy or complete seriousness. I got worried about it, and then I added this letter. It was important we saw that, from the beginning, the parents know that she's okay.

That she’s out there.

And then it's more his curiosity to understand what happened. Somehow it was important to never really say or indicate what was the reason for her [leaving]. I think if you know things, it's really hard then to escape that, it becomes part of the film.

Even though sometimes I have these moments when my mind is working in a way to maybe ask the questions and try to answer them, I always try to stop this process. In my experience, everything you know becomes part of the film. I try to leave some things unanswered or unthought.

I’ve read that you have a love for silent films, could you speak a little bit about this?

When you watch very early films, you see these endless ideas, really big ideas about how and what cinema can be, how it can work. It's an endless box of treasures. Sometimes I have a feeling that everything is there. Very often when something is starting, everything is already there and it's really condensed. And then it just has to flourish. If you go back, you will discover that everything that was done later was already there. So to go to look for inspiration there, it's only logical.

It’s this condensation that's very interesting [to me], and this idea that a film can be a very different thing to how the industry has developed it.

You know it's a big tree, and we just sit on one branch, and we think that's everything. But actually, the rest is there, and we just have to find it and do it. I think it's hard to jump from one branch to another. You have to go to the roots, and then you can go up again.

We are back in the garden.

Thinking about Levan, the invisible companion on this journey, I was reminded of when performers are asked to act across from someone or something that isn't there. Let's say their scene partner is a dragon, for example, or a talking animal, and it is going to be superimposed into the scene in post. Can we talk about that subtraction? Where was the voice actor? How did you take him out of the frame?

It was very funny because there are scenes where the main actor and the dialogue is cut as shot-reverse-shot with close-ups. But sometimes you have them far away, maybe 50 meters away, and they are talking. And if this was happening in some village, and I'm quite far with this little tripod, which you don't really see as a camera if you are passing by. Then people would see this man talking into the emptiness, which I think for my father who was acting, it was kind of intimidating. Many people thought that he was just out of his mind, and I couldn't stop laughing. Standing really far away and seeing him try to signal to the people that he's okay.

Okay in the way an actor is never okay.

The main thing was to find the right tone for him; how he could talk to the emptiness, how loud, where he should look. For me also, it was new to discover all these details. 

Especially because we would pan a lot. I would pan with him and tell him, “he's beside you, he’s next to you, talk with him.” But then you have to also imagine that sometimes you look at the person you are talking to, and other times you don't. To keep this balance was not easy, but luckily we had time to work around it with many takes. And as you said, there’s not so much dialogue in the film. 

If you pan, and there is someone visible in the image, you know how fast you have to pan. But if you pan with an invisible character, it's always hard to know how fast, because it also depends on the distance. If he's really far, then you can do it slower. It's really not helpful if you ask someone to make this for you first and then try to repeat it, because you can get lost in this process.

There are many little details which—but these were details of joy. I was really enjoying it because it's like a game. It was fun for everyone developing this.

It's funny that you mention how inconspicuous you were when shooting with a phone. People are more accustomed now to seeing phones held up around them. It's been naturalised into public life, we just expect and accept that we are being filmed when we're around people.

I was having a conversation a few weeks back where we were debating whether or not being invisible was a kind of superpower, if it was a good thing.

With this film, I tried to remove all the differences between being visible and invisible. I tried to somehow establish a world where it means nothing at all, where it makes no difference. But of course, it’s a fantasy.

I just had this wish to make a little friendship between two characters. I was thinking about Jim Jarmusch’s film when a niece is coming from Hungary. There are two friends and then this girl comes to visit them. But the thing is that nothing really happens in this film. In the end you realise that it’s just about a small connection between two strangers. I think it's Stranger than Paradise.

Also a film associated with Locarno.

The two people who don't know each other can get close, not too close, but find some closeness, and I really love that. I was thinking about it a lot. 

What I tried to make, in the end, it didn't really go in that direction. But the initial idea was to establish a little closeness between two people.

Alexandre Koberidze’s Dry Leaf is in Australian cinemas from 17 September.

Charles Carrall is a critic living in Sydney, Australia. He is the Program Manager at Sydney Film Festival.