Sometimes, a movie sneaks up on you, sidling in like a lamb and striding out like a lion, revealing its brilliance only after you’ve brushed away the sand and grit of first impressions. Much more rarely — in fact, corresponding exactly to the release rate of movies by visionary German director Valeska Grisebach — the brilliance goes bone-deep, emerging from an astonishingly new and strange filmic architecture. Grisebach’s fourth feature is just such a marvel, a verité social drama, cast with non-professionals, that from the improvisational immediacy of small-scale real life, gradually gathers all the elements of a sprawling crime epic. “The Dreamed Adventure” is basically a modern Bulgarian “The Godfather,” rangily reworked as a docudrama with suntanned arms, a squinting grin and a sly way of lolling back in its plastic chair as after-dinner conversation, sloshed and salty, rolls around the patio table.
The Bulgarian town of Svilengrad is close to both the Greek and Turkish borders and situated near a highway that leads to the second-busiest border-crossing in the world. It’s a place that millions have passed through but few, outside its actual inhabitants, have lingered in, despite attractions that proudly include, per the town’s wiki page, 3 DVD rental shops, two cinemas and a library. Said (Syuleyman Letifov, an auto-parts salesman whose only other acting credit is in Grisebach’s terrific “Western”) an erstwhile local with a ready smile and several lifetimes of experience etched into his affable, watchful face, is returning to the region for the first time in a long while. His windshield is smeared with the dust of a lengthy road journey. The landscape is baked and scrubby. He stops to buy water and make a phone call.
