Lisa, a photographer who traveled through rural Georgia taking pictures of soccer fields, disappears, leaving behind a mysterious note. Irakli, the girl's father, and Levani, her invisible friend, set out to find her, retracing Lisa's entire route and seeing the same landscapes.

At first glance, this detective road movie turns out to be a deception, as is customary in festival cinema that hints at the genre. The mystery of the disappearance is reinforced until the very end only by rare conversations with residents encountered along the way. The plot turns out to be just an excuse for Koberidze and the audience to admire the disappearing pastoral landscapes, to immerse themselves in the everyday life of boys playing football and stray dogs.

Gradually dissolving into the landscapes, the plot offers us to shift our attention from the events to the world around us — as beautiful as it is fragile. Koberidze emphasizes both of these qualities with pixelated sunsets and colored spots instead of human figures — all thanks to a Sony Ericsson phone camera. This deliberately “poor-quality” image simultaneously evokes warm feelings of nostalgia, becomes a radical contemporary gesture in contrast to 4K ultra-realism, and emphasizes the ephemeral nature of the reality in front of us.

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Media partner of the film program: ‘98mag