At the start of German filmmaker Valeska Grisebach’s “The Dreamed Adventure,” a chiselled featured man rolls into a dusty border town, having been absent for years. It’s changed, but so too we find has he. It’s like the start of a Western.
This is no coincidence, Grisebach tells Variety, ahead of the film’s world premiere on Friday in the Cannes competition section. She was inspired to make the film after she shot her film “Western” in Bulgaria, which also used the genre to explore the Eastern Europe country.
Veska, played by Yana Radeva, and Said, played by Syuleyman Letifov, in “The Dreamed Adventure”
Courtesy of Komplizen Film, Bernhard Keller
In “The Dreamed Adventure,” which is set on the border between Bulgaria and Turkey, she surveys the country’s troubled present but also traces the roots of its contemporary ills, the Wild West-style era of the 1990s, when, following the fall of communism, Mafiosi filled the vacuum left by Communist Party stooges.
