The Dreamed Adventure

Part of my coverage of the 62nd Chicago International Film Festival

THE DREAMED ADVENTURE   **

Valeska Grisebach

2026

IDEA:  An archeologist and her old acquaintance fall back into the criminal network they were involved in during Bulgaria's immediate post-Soviet years.

BLURB:  The Dreamed Adventure is a crime movie, a Western, and an ethnographic documentary, but only sort of. It’s kind of an adventure, but then, the title tells us that part is dreamed. Throughout the film’s saggy 164-minute runtime, Grisebach demonstrates a refusal of spectacle or dramatic excitement that is almost admirable. Set amid the infrastructural and social decay of a small town on the Bulgarian-Turkish border in the present day, the story lumbers between interchangeably decrepit buildings and dirt roads, linked by rambling dinner-table conversations held in the dark outside. Grisebach’s docufiction style is most evident in these scenes, where an array of mostly older folk, seemingly speaking from experience, reminisce about life in Bulgaria in the years immediately following the fall of the Soviet Union. Pointedly, how that past is remembered is divided along gender lines: at an all-female gathering, the women lament how terribly they were treated by men impervious to any law but their own, while the all-male gathering is filled with casual misogyny and nostalgia for the unchecked corruption of the past, which we learn is far from past. Our guide through this ecosystem is Yana Radeva’s Veska, who, in the film’s most effective gambit, replaces a man (Syuleyman Letifov’s Said) as the protagonist about a third of the way in. Like the rest of the nonprofessional cast, Radeva and Letifov have exceptionally intriguing faces but dubious ability to hold the screen during The Dreamed Adventure’s wanly shot, talky longueurs. There’s a very good, taut movie in here somewhere, one that’s still neorealist and feminist and detailed about the local-level socioeconomics of post-Communist Eastern Europe, but it’s been lost in a listless, shapeless sprawl.