The Dreamed Adventure: Valeska Grisebach’s haunting slow-burn western unearths dirty dealings in rural Bulgaria
As in Grisebach’s 2017 film Western, the battle here is a lawless one over land and resources as a tough archaeologist tries to protect her work site from an interfering mafioso.
- Reviewed from the 2026 Cannes Film Festival
The German director Valeska Grisebach first turned her artistic gaze to rural Bulgaria with her 2017 film Western and the contradictions she found there made her stay. Machismo and tenderness coexist also in its follow-up, The Dreamed Adventure, a film so fully shaped by the place and its people that it depicts the country as we’ve never seen before: both daunting and beloved. In its simple plot, two weathered leads – archaeologist Veska (a luminous debut by Yana Radeva) and her mysterious acquaintance Saïd (Syuleyman Letifov) – find themselves in a tug-of-war with a sleek mafioso and a darker past.
With an affection that’s evident in a slow-burn narrative and immersive storytelling, Grisebach unspools the thread of Eastern violence from the 1990s – labelled by one character as “the golden age of men” – until now. For Eastern countries like Bulgaria, the fall of the Berlin Wall was a promise for a better future, a vow that capitalism failed to keep. Instead, illegal schemes for easy money often led to shoot-outs between rival gangs and the echoes of those times still reverberate in the border town of Svilengrad, where your biggest mistake is to underestimate a woman like Veska.
Radeva, a non-professional actor like the rest of the cast, shines, embodying Veska’s persistence and composure to an almost mythical degree. The men around her protest – how dare she help Saïd? How dare she stand her ground on the archaeological site and seek justice, when her response to rising tensions is to keep on smiling? To match tone with form, Grisebach’s regular cinematographer (Bernhard Keller) and editor (Bettina Böhler) capture a rhythm of compressed emotions and expansive late-night dinner scenes, de-escalated by episodes of Veska traversing the papery yellows and rich greens of the town’s surroundings. The film is like a series of sharp inhales and exhales, suspense and release, as the protagonist questions the bravery and cowardice in the people she meets.
Similar to Western, the battle here is a lawless one over land and resources, but the suspense (coupled with western genre tropes) convey just how it feels to inhabit this reality. For most of the film, the characters speak their mind through (in)action, not words, as if reacting to an invisible force field. Veska emerges as a new kind of protagonist for Grisebach – bellicose and radically optimistic at once. With her command of the screen and over pesky, power-hungry men at the centre of the film, The Dreamed Adventure defies the expectations of the western, and instead imagines what an ‘Eastern’ can be, reminding us that there is always a choice between good and bad.