‘The Dreamed Adventure’ review: Exhilarating Bulgarian borderlands fable makes expert use of non-professional cast

Dir: Valeska Grisebach. Germany/France/Bulgaria/Austria. 2026. 167mins

A magnificent example of cinema built from the ground up, The Dreamed Adventure sees German director Valeska Grisebach’s return to the borderlands of southern Bulgaria, nine years after the well-received Western (2017), to spin a story which is both grittily realist and other-worldly. This raw, unpredictable tale about an archaeologist who excavates more than pot shards and old coins when she returns to her home territory to lead a dig is recognizably of today, yet infused with the many histories of a frontier town that inhabits an uncertain zone of transit, where Europe ends – or begins.

Both grittily realist and other-worldly

Running at almost three hours, yet relentlessly absorbing, The Dreamed Adventure, which is produced by Germany’s Komplitzen Film (Gentle Monster, Sentimental Value, Toni Erdmann), deploys a cast of non-professionals led by former geologist and casino manager Yana Radeva. Grisebach shares with Turkish filmmaker Nure Bilge Ceylan the ability to infuse a seemingly rambling story with urgency, to situate characters in a landscape that both unites and divides them while becoming a character in its own right. Arthouse distributors searching for films that connect with audiences in refreshing, original ways should take note.

First seen in Western, quarryman and car accessories salesman Syuleyman Letifov returns here as – what exactly? We know only that his character Said – a Pomak, or Bulgarian Muslim – has come to the dusty borderlands near the town of Svilengrad, skirted by a motorway where trucks roar past on their way to and from Turkey, to buy diesel fuel from a shady dealer called The Raven. With his lined face and hooded eyes, Said is a man of few words. He’s seen and done a lot, we intuit, not all of it good, but there’s a gentleness in him that comes to the fore when he reconnects with Vesna (Radeva). She’s here to supervise an archaeological dig centred on a ruined Medieval fortress that stands as silent witness to the chequered history of an area which was part of the Ottoman Empire until 1912.

There’s clearly a spark between Vesna and Said. But there are also distractions. Though people have settled here for millennia, this dusty, scrubby borderland is an unsettled place of shady deals and contemporary banditry, where people traffickers operate thanks to the collusion of local and national authorities. We never get a sense of how the various locations we see are connected; everything is periphery, nothing is centred. Characters are in constant motion, sometimes they simply disappear.

Vesna spends as much time in her battered jeep as she does on a dig that, it is gradually revealed, must content itself with the scraps left over from centuries of depredation. She stumbles on a seemingly abandoned hotel that turns out to house a group of Polish women. She visits an isolated rural property where a table of men straight out of a modern Spaghetti Western sit drinking raki. Gradually, we discover that Vesna herself is a local, with the kind of backstory that doesn’t often lead to academic success. The Dreamed Adventure holds us through its extended running time partly because we’re always playing catch-up, trying to assemble the pieces of a fragmented story that itself feels lawless, edgy and dangerous.

Much talk swirls around the anarchic, aggressive early free-market years in Bulgaria that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. That was the era of men, burly local mafia boss Iliya (Stoicho Kostadinov) tells Vesna during a tense conversation at a party he’s hosting in his flashy villa with its squawky peacocks. The two of them have history. But history is subjective – just like the artefacts the archaeologist and her team are unearthing in the glaring sun of the dig, amidst arid hills, it needs to be interpreted. When she tells Iliya that her own story of that ‘era of men’ is, among other things, about women who were used and abused, he replies “I don’t like your memories”.

Everything is in flux in The Dreamed Adventure, even the genre of a film that shape-shifts between noir, western and romance. At its heart is the director’s extraordinary deployment of a cast of non-professionals who seem to carry their own stories with them in every line and gesture.