“The Dreamed Adventure”, interview with the director Valeska Grisebach

In competition at the 79th Cannes Film Festival, “The Dreamed Adventure” marks Valeska Grisebach’s return to Bulgaria after “Western”. Set in Svilengrad, a town on the Bulgarian border, the film follows Veska, an archaeologist, as her encounter with Said, an old acquaintance whose car has been stolen, pulls her into a hidden network of criminal ties beneath the town’s apparently quiet surface.

Grisebach explained that her earlier experience in Bulgaria left her with the sense that the country still held stories she needed to understand.

“I realised how limited my knowledge about Europe is,” she said. “Europe has so many different faces, and in Bulgaria Europe can feel very different than in Germany.”

Europe’s Blind Spots

For Grisebach, the film also arises from a personal reckoning with European history. Raised in West Berlin, she felt deeply connected to the generational experience of 1989, yet increasingly aware of how differently that turning point was lived across the continent.

“We are connected by that changing moment in Europe,” she said, “but also divided by the different experiences that followed.”

The director described The Dreamed Adventure as a collaborative project rather than an external gaze placed upon Bulgaria.

“I had doubts because I am a German director,” she admitted. “Who is telling whose story? But once I was in contact with people, those doubts began to disappear.”

Adventure, Genre and Desire

The title “The Dreamed Adventure” carries, for Grisebach, a deliberate ambiguity. It connects the film to adventure cinema and to the Western genres traditionally coded as male and often built around strength, conquest and survival.

“Adventure was a link to genre,” she explained. “I was interested in having a woman look into that genre, then step into it.”

The “dreamed” aspect also refers to the 1990s, a decade the director sees as filled with promises, desires and unresolved contradictions.

“It was a time full of dreams,” she said, “but also an ambivalent time, because many dreams were not fulfilled.”

Veska and the Question of the Gaze

At the centre of the film is Veska, a woman who observes before acting. Her profession as an archaeologist becomes essential to the film’s method: she reads surfaces, studies traces and looks for meaning in details others overlook.

For Grisebach, this attentiveness was crucial: “The gaze was very important to me,” she said. “Who owns the gaze?”

The director linked this question to her own relationship with genre cinema. “I have internalised a male gaze, also through genre films,” she reflected. “For me, it was interesting, and sometimes difficult, to bring a woman in motion in a film.”

Rather than claiming to rewrite cinematic language, Grisebach described her approach as an interaction with existing traditions. “I wouldn’t say rewriting,” she concluded. “Filmmaking has so much to do with getting in contact with something.”

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