New York 2026 Review: THE DREAMED ADVENTURE, Once Upon a Time in Bulgaria
A middle-aged man, Said (Syuleyman Alilov Letifov), comes back to his small Bulgarian hometown, situated not far from the borders of both Turkey and Greece.
He is here to conduct some shady deal involving diesel fuel, but when his car is stolen, he conveniently bumps into an old friend, Veska (Yana Radeva), who is also back for the first time in years, overseeing a small archeological dig.
When Said disappears, Veska, seemingly more out of boredom than worry, inserts herself into a web of local intrigues that also concern another old acquaintance from her past – a provincial kingpin (Stoicho Kostadinov).
At the behest of the curators of both Cannes Film Festival and NYFF, The Dreamed Adventure, a new, long-awaited film by German director Valeska Grisebach, had an unexpected companion in both programs in the form of James Gray’s Paper Tiger. While being very different films with very different optics, both are the stories of characters who venture into dangerous territory and criminal intrigue where they are obviously out of their depth. Both even have a very particular dream-like feel to them; in Grisebach’s film, it’s right there in the title, after all.
But where Gray speaks the language of a Greek tragedy wrapped in a criminal genre dressing, Grisebach deconstructs the genres she is playing around with; and there's more than one woven in here. Set in roughly the same provincial landscape as her previous mesmerizing feature, Western, which came out nine years ago, The Dream Adventure somehow manages to shuffle the ragged realism of a European festival slow burn with the poetics of contemporary frontier, the absurdism of the semi-criminal plot with the sense of a strange provincial film noir.
Everything in this film paradoxically feels both realistic and surreal, from the dusty boondocks, painted in muted pastel colors, to a set of characters who are played by non-professional actors (including the outstandingly nuanced Yana Radeva), but feel like participants in some nonexistent old movie – something one actually might have seen in a dream. Veska is the Philip Marlowe of this familiar, yet unexpected world, eagerly standing off against bald, scowling thugs (one hilariously has a Godfather tattoo on his arm), enthusiastically concocting cheeky schemes, quickly becoming the object of desire for all major male characters, and gulping rakija.
Like most feverish dreams on a hot, stuffy summer night, there is darkness lurking underneath the possibility of an adventure. While nothing of the sort overtly happens on screen in the present time, there is a consistent dark shadow, a distinct murmur among the characters reminding us how much violence is tragically engraved in most women’s experience.
And yet, when that final morning before the end credits comes, we’re left with a surprisingly light sense of a true adventure, a mischief managed. A truly (if slightly darkly) magical experience that leaves no regrets, except for the suspicion that we might have to wait another nine years for the next one.
The film enjoys its U.S. premiere at the 2026 New York Film Festival. Visit the official festival site for more information.
