Valeska Grisebach on 'The Dreamed Adventure' and Playing the Long Game
Das Getraumte Abenteuer, The Dreamed Adventure
Cannes Film Festival
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It’s been a long time coming, but Valeska Grisebach is back in Cannes.
The German director is presenting her new feature, The Dreamed Adventure, in the competition lineup, closing out the festival on the final Friday, May 22.
The last time she was on the Croisette was way back in 2017 with Western, which premiered in the Un Certain Regard section to critical acclaim, a confirmation of the promise of her two previous features, Mein Stein (2002), which won the Critics’ Award at the Toronto Film Festival, and Sehnsucht (2006), a Competition entry in Berlin in 2006.
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But Western‘s success — it went on to win the German Film Critics’ Award for Best Feature Film, and was a runner-up for the Lolas, Germany’s Oscar-equivalent — didn’t make it much easier for Grisebach to get The Dreamed Adventure made. Her way of working — using amateur actors, shooting without a conventional script — has made it difficult for her to secure traditional financing from European funds and film boards.
“That happens to me constantly,” she says, “even though I’ve already made several films without a conventionally written screenplay, it still irritates [funders]. I hope one day that changes for me.”
The Dreamed Adventure could be the film that does it. The slow-burning crime thriller continues Grisebach’s experimentation with “male-coded genres” that she explored to such powerful effect in Western, which followed German construction workers who set up camp in rural Bulgaria like Union Soldiers in Apache country in an old John Ford movie. In The Dreamed Adventure, the focus is on Veska, an archaeologist working near the Bulgarian-Greek-Turkish border — “Europe’s external border,” as Grisebach puts it — who becomes entwined in a war between rival criminal gangs.
The Match Factory is handling international sales for The Dreamed Adventure at the Cannes market.
It’s been almost 10 years since your last film, and there was 10 years between Sehnsucht and Western. Why do your films take or require so much time to get made?
It’s been different each time. After Sehnsucht, I had a daughter, so that played a role in delaying things. But one reason is research. I could probably spend years researching endlessly. For me research, casting and writing all go hand in hand. And that simply takes time.
After Western, it became clear to me I wanted to make another film in Bulgaria. Because I realized how little I actually know about Europe, how many blind spots I have, and how different Europe feels in Bulgaria compared to Germany. I grew up in West Berlin and was socially conditioned to go further West. It took me quite a while to travel in the other direction.
But I was worried, as a German director, trying to make a film in Bulgaria without really knowing the place. It was clear my research would take time, time to get to know certain places, certain people, to collaborate. Through the research, and the collaboration, my doubts kept dissolving. But because I was moving on very unfamiliar terrain, it was important to give that process time. Then, of course, there are all the financing issues. With every project, it seems I am ready and then have to wait another year to finish financing before I can shoot.
Was there a particular moment that became the initial spark for the idea that eventually turned into this film?
I think that actually came before the research. What deeply moved me when we were shooting Western was talking to people from my generation. I’m 58 now, and people who were young in 1989, during the fall of the Berlin Wall. I had the feeling that we are all deeply connected through those ruptures and through that transformation in Europe, but at the same time separated by very different experiences in the years after reunification and afterward, up until today. That echo still continues today.
I think there was a kind of click moment when people said that the 1990s in Bulgaria were like wartime — a time for men, not a time for women. That was a motif that kept coming up and that interested me, this war analogy. It connected with my interest in genre, especially male-coded genres, and with questions about which roles are assigned to women and men. That was one of the starting points that I then