The Dreamed Adventure

Valeska Grisebach is one of the central figures of the so-called Berlin School, the loose movement of rigorous German realists that also includes Christian Petzold and Maren Ade. The Dreamed Adventure is her first feature since Western (2017), and after a gap of nearly a decade its place in the main competition of the 79th Cannes Film Festival was an event in itself. It premiered in May 2026, her first time competing for the Palme d'Or, and won the Jury Prize.

The film is set in a town on Bulgaria's south-eastern border, where Veska, an archaeologist, gets entangled with an old acquaintance and, through him, with a smuggling scheme that edges into contested and dangerous territory. As in Western, Grisebach works at the frontier of Europe with a cast of non-professionals. She builds tension out of glances, silences and the slow accumulation of trust and risk, with very little in the way of incident, and the result is a restrained, watchful film noir that keeps a good deal back from its audience.

Critics read it as a deliberate dismantling of the neo-noir blueprint, trading genre momentum for the ethnographic patience that is Grisebach's hallmark. She makes films rarely, and she has shaped a generation of European realism, so it is no surprise that this was among the most discussed titles of the festival. Her unhurried method has lost none of its force in the long interval.