Dry Leaf · reception & legacy
2026 · Alexandre Koberidze
How Dry Leaf has been received, argued over, and remembered.
The arc
A Locarno 2025 Special Mention that read as a festival curio at first, it snowballed into a full-blown cinephile event by its spring 2026 US release — Cinema Guild put it in theaters, Film at Lincoln Center opened it, and Dennis Lim was writing NYRB essays about its pixels.
What's debated
The fight is simple and eternal: is three hours of deliberately smeared 144p phone footage a transcendent way of seeing, or an endurance test with no rationale — even admirers admit the 'shot on an old phone' premise splits every room it plays.
Its footprint
Its whole cultural identity is the image itself — blotchy, foggy, barely-legible frames from a 2008 cameraphone that critics keep trying to name (Dennis Lim's essay was literally titled 'How Should a Pixel Be?'); even the trailer drop, via Letterboxd, led with the phone.
Where it stands
A fast-rising canon climber in the slow-cinema/experimental corner of Letterboxd — the new 'you sat through all three hours?' badge of honor among festival-circuit devotees.