Western

Valeska Grisebach's third feature, made twelve years after Longing, premiered in Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2017 and became one of the defining works of the Berlin School's late period. Like her colleagues Christian Petzold and Maren Ade, she casts non-professionals and lets scenes run past the point where a conventional film would cut.

Meinhard Neumann, a horse trader Grisebach found at a rodeo, plays a German labourer on a construction contract near the Greek border who begins spending his evenings in the village rather than at the camp. The genre reference in the title is exact — a frontier, a stranger, a horse, a water dispute — but it is played as economics rather than myth: Germans with equipment and money, Bulgarians with land and no leverage, and one man trying to be something other than an occupier.

The film was Germany's Academy Award submission and won the German Film Critics' Best Film prize. It reads differently now that Grisebach has taken the Jury Prize at Cannes 2026 with The Dreamed Adventure, already in the catalogue — this is the film that earned her that slot, and the better introduction to how she works.