Writer: Valeska Grisebach, Lisa Bierwirth
Director: Valeska Grisebach
In The Dreamed Adventure (Das geträumte Abenteuer), director Valeska Grisebach once again delivers a distinctive and immersive piece of docu-realist slow cinema, this time approaching the crime thriller genre sideways. Driven by the reappearance of an old flame, Veska (Yana Radeva), a middle-aged archaeologist, is drawn into the volatile criminal underworld of her Bulgarian border town, confronting a history she thought she had left behind. Resisting the expectations of genre at every turn, the film relies on non-professional actors, naturalistic sound, and unhurried shots, making the plot secondary to mood and local ambience. Yet there are still faintly recognisable traces of the gangster flick — a gun, sinister mafia clans, tense ambushes—that propel this compelling narrative strictly on its own terms. Grisebach performed a similar trick in her previous film, Western, using genre tropes obliquely to study a protagonist navigating an insular community with unspoken rules.
The story begins with Saïd (Syuleyman Letifov), a greying, rumpled figure who recalls Harry Dean Stanton. He returns to Svilengrad—a town near the Turkish and Greek borders described by one character as beginning where the law ends—only to find that enemies have already caught wind of his arrival. Seemingly up to his old tricks, Saïd gets involved in smuggling fuel across the border, ruffling feathers with local kingpin Iliya (Stoicho Kostadinov) and a shadowy rival force known as “The Raven”. He re-establishes contact with Veska, who is working on a dig near Matochina. But before long, his car goes missing, and the film wrongfoots us by having him vanish entirely from the narrative.
From this point, the focus shifts fully to Veska, anchored by an outstanding performance from Yana Radeva. Making her acting debut, Radeva delivers an expressive, sensual, and unadorned portrayal of a woman fighting patriarchal and criminal forces. As her own life becomes entangled in this seemingly lawless borderland, Veska is caught up in fuel deals, human trafficking networks, and power plays between rival crime bosses. The land at her archaeological site takes on thematic significance, seeming to conceal not just artefacts but ghosts and secrets — a theme neatly synthesised when one character remarks, “I was a gravedigger, and now I work on excavation sites.” An intriguing secondary strand involves a threat to a young woman at the site, whom Veska feels compelled to protect. Misogyny and violence are never far beneath the surface, but Veska remains defiant in this intimidating atmosphere controlled by men prepared to do anything to retain their power.
The film’s title remains deliberately shrouded in ambiguity, befitting this beguiling, low-key epic: is Veska’s quest propelled by the dream of a better future, an attempt to escape the past, or a desire to right past wrongs for a future generation? Grisebach’s characters remain complex and elusive, and the film unfolds at the meticulous, leisurely pace of a novel, immersing us in male power, buried histories and shifting allegiances with precision and spontaneity, while preserving its manifold mysteries. This is thrilling and intelligent filmmaking.
The Dreamed Adventure is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2026 from 7-18 October.
