Nine years after Western (2017)—a tense, tremulous drama about a group of German construction workers in a remote Bulgarian village—upended the masculine grammar of its namesake genre, Valeska Grisebach returns with The Dreamed Adventure. A high watermark of this year’s Cannes Competition as well as the winner of the Jury Prize, the film relies on a remarkable cast of mostly nonprofessional actors, including Western star Syuleyman Alilov Letifov and indelible first-time performer Yana Radeva. This time out, Grisebach reworks the conventions of the gangster movie, spinning them into a grim, graceful, yet unassuming epic about the dangerous secrets of a community in Svilengrad, a dusty bordertown at the shared frontier of Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey. 

Our heroine is Radeva’s Veska, an unshakeable middle-aged archaeologist leading a digging project that inadvertently reunites her with Said (Letifov), a figure from her past seeking to settle old scores with the members of a smuggling network he was once involved with. This outline of a crime movie doesn’t do justice to the enigmatic powers of Grisebach’s digressive narrative, which abounds in local detail and offers startling insights into Bulgarian gender relations after the fall of the Soviet Union, the dynamics of European trade and labor systems in the age of global capitalism, and the limits of historical memory in a fractured, war-torn society. 

At the tail-end of Cannes, I sat down with Grisebach to discuss the film, her second set in Bulgaria, and the inspirations behind its feminine focus. 

You shot Western in Petrelik in western Bulgaria. And now for The Dreamed Adventure you’ve moved to Svilengrad. Is there any sort of connection between these places for you?

The village in Western gave me some orientation marks. I wanted to remain in places close to the border, so I simply continued to go further east. The border interests me because it’s a space of adventure. From literature and books, we think of hiding, smuggling, and escaping, but that element is also real. And then we arrived in Svilengrad, which is a little border town close to the Kapitan Andreevo border crossing and one of the largest border crossing zones in the world—I think comparable to the U.S.–Mexico crossing. Everything that comes from the Near East, from Turkey, passes through there. It’s the old Silk Road. So for Europe it’s an important strategic, political, and economic point. But I think the main reason we settled in Svilengrad was because of the women. I met so many interesting women there that inspired me to return again and again. I came to understand a lot more about the people who grew up close to the border during Communist times, and then later, after 1989. The area was a hotspot for business and smuggling. 

Was Yana Radeva, who plays Veska, among these women you met in Svilengrad?

Well, actually, she’s from Sofia [the capital of Bulgaria]. But, yes, we met her in casting, which was also part of our research process since I went into the project with many doubts as a German filmmaker making a film in Bulgaria. With Yana, it was unplanned. She came to the casting call again and again, and her concentration and devotion to the project was striking. But it was also like she had played the character her entire life. 

She’s excellent. She conveys Veska’s history and her wisdom very naturally, in the way she holds herself—in her physicality. I read that she was formerly a geologist, and then worked in the gambling industry, and most recently started a small business selling cosmetics and agricultural products. 

Living in Bulgaria, Yana experienced extreme inflation, the kind where you have nothing to eat, and you’re in a bar and from morning to evening the price will go from 200 to 2,000 leva for a coffee. Living through things like that gives you the skill to improvise. 

Western is a film about masculinity and male dynamics, but The Dreamed Adventure shifts the focus to the women. On the one hand, it’s about how they survive within this patriarchal society, but this isn’t presented didactically or with the aim of educating us about gender relations in Bulgaria. Despite the misogynistic violence that frequently happens around her, and which she’s probably experienced herself, Yana still desires. Her sexuality isn’t hidden. 

It’s not about how the society she inhabits negates her desire, but about how its dangers force her to express it in different ways and with more caution. This is communicated beautifully in her relationship with Maria (Denislava Yordanova), whom Veska plays a kind of surrogate mother to.

I’m so happy that you see this, and say that she has desire.

One starting point for the project was, of course, my fascination with the more male or masculine-coded genres. Talking to other women in Bulgaria about the period after 1989 was really fascinating for me. I realized that we are so connected in Europe, and at the same time so separated, because even though Yana and I are of the same generation, I had a totally different experience of that time. And then, again and again, I kept hearing stories about women who were taken from the streets by mafia guys, or people close to the mafia. Not for prostitution necessarily, but also just for fun. If there was a beautiful woman, these guys would just decide to kidnap her and let her go the next day. People also described the ’90s as being like a time of war—a time for men, not women. At the same time, I didn’t want this violence to take over the whole story, which would’ve reduced [Veska] to her stigmatization. To some extent, she is also independent and free from it, even if those experiences are something she carries with her. She owns her story. 

Was the archeological site real, or did you have to create it?

We found it but had to reanimate it a bit. If you had asked me before if I would ever choose to make my main character an archaeologist, I would’ve said that’s a bit kitschy. But during the research process, a friend of mine brought me to the Turkish border where we found this site being worked on by a group of people and led by a woman. I was touched by the situation, where there are so many different people from different economic backgrounds who are united by history—by what’s hidden in the Earth. I was also attracted to the idea that archaeologists are aware of little details. They’re people whose job it is to look and observe. And Veska is always looking; her gaze is central to the film. 

Syuleyman Letifov, who plays Said, was also in Western. Did you have him in mind from the beginning when you were writing the script for this new film? 

I brought him along because he’s my partner. We’re together. But he’s also a dramaturg. Here, he has a consulting credit, because we talked about the story exhaustively, since we both live and work together. 

I didn’t realize that! I had been wondering if collaborating with Syuleyman again had encouraged you to make the film entirely in Bulgarian, because in Western there is much more German being spoken. I also read that some of your actors don’t speak German or English. 

Of course, there was somebody there to translate, but there are moments where you have to communicate directly. On Western, I relied much more on a translator.

But since then your Bulgarian has improved?

Yeah. It’s a real gift, this direct communication. Though when translating dialogue, when it comes to more specific things, I do need the help of other actors and crewmembers.

You typically write your scripts on your own but this time you share the credit with Lisa Bierwirth. How did that come about? 

Lisa is in France, but we’re very close collaborators. She’s directed her own films (Prince, 2021) but she was also my artistic assistant on Western. We’re very close friends, and the relationship we have where we’re able to talk deeply about our projects is very dear to me. So for The Dreamed Adventure, I wrote the first draft of the script and then she came on to help me develop it further. 

Your films feel so lived-in; they flow freely and drift into extended moments of silence and everyday activities. Do you ask your actors to improvise? 

I don’t write classical scripts. I write texts, like blocks of prose. It’s really hard to finance a film with a script that doesn’t look like a script. There is dialogue, of course, but for me it’s very important that we don’t have the script in our hands when we are working, because I’m a little bit afraid of this moment when people learn dialogue and it’s not really in their head. So at a certain point I have to put it away and try to remember the dialogue from a distance so that the scene itself can take over. This creates something new, even if you look at the script later and realize it’s being said exactly how it’s written. There are moments when we improvise, but that’s not our general way of working. 

So then do you rehearse a lot to make the dialogue hang the right way? 

Yeah, we rehearse quite a bit. We talk a lot before scenes and a lot about dialogue. I let the actors take over. And then of course there’s dialogue I can’t write—maybe I write it in my words, but a 70-year-old miner, when he takes the words from me, he’ll inevitably change them. 

You’ve worked with your cinematographer Bernhard Keller on all three of your features. What were your conversations like here? 

We talk about the body of the film: the light, the differences we want to create between night and day, or sometimes which lens fits which actor. Sometimes a certain lens is not good for her or for him. We talk a lot, always, about creating a more everyday feeling, so as to release a kind of tension from the image. How can we combine a more staged mise en scène with a more casual way of looking? The film is quite artificially made, but the goal is to make it look organic and unguarded. Bernhard sometimes has to react very fast since we’re dealing with natural light. He has a strong sense for when an image has too much intention, for when it wants too much in a static way. He’s not into that but I like it a lot, so we tend to correct each other in a productive way.

Like Western, The Dreamed Adventure is a film of striking, expansive landscapes. It’s very attuned to space and the way its characters inhabit and are sucked into it. But it’s also quite different. 

It was primarily about choosing the location. It’s a little bit rougher [in Svilengrad]—flatter, with more industrial architecture. We didn’t want to recapture these romantic Bulgarian mountains, but to show something a little more contemporary. There’s business happening here. There are expensive hotels. 

Your editor, Bettina Böhler, has worked with Christian Petzold, Angela Schanelec, and Margarethe von Trotta, among others. This is also your third collaboration—what do you like about working with her?

She’s a magician. She’s someone who truly tries to understand the director’s vision and treats it very tenderly. At the same time, she’s very direct and takes full responsibility for the edit. Editing is about finding the film again and putting it on its feet. Bettina edits image and sound at the same time. I do the rough edit and then she arrives and we go at it together. We talk a lot—not about “here’s a cut, there’s a cut,” but about subtexts and emotions and feelings. 

I want to ask about the title—The Dreamed Adventure—which I love and find so evocative. How did you come to it? 

The title was there from the beginning of the project, though I was a bit uncertain whether it would stay. We tend to think of genres like westerns as owned by their male protagonists. At the same time, as a little girl, I was also fascinated by them; they were these repositories for all my fantasies and desires. I identified with their male heroes at the same time that I longed for them, which creates a very strange emotional mixture. So from the beginning I had this image in my head: of a building or architectural space, and a woman looking at it from the outside—and then, suddenly, stepping inside it. I also thought of the period after 1989 as a time full of promise—of democracy and capitalism—and how everyone dreamt of being a millionaire. But the reality is that these adventures, these dreams, are very often quite ambivalent.