The Dreamed Adventure review beautiful but opaque Bulgarian tale of digging up the past

A woman runs an archaeological dig in remote mountainous Bulgaria where memories of Balkan wars and the communist era remain vivid. She encounters an old friend who has returned after decades to buy stolen diesel fuel from a local villain. The friend is tied to shady business dealings and a people-trafficking network that profits from organized crime. Locals resent his presence because of earlier theft connected to the woman’s past. The film uses informal gatherings and nonprofessional performances to create easy, talkative scenes. It avoids conventional narrative templates, building toward a meaning that remains elusive moment by moment, with consequences that do not follow typical violent arthouse patterns.

"The digging up of the past and the hiding of secrets in the present are the themes of Valeska Grisebach's complex, subtle, opaque new drama which seems to withhold some of its narrative meaning from the audience, moment-by-moment. It is set, like her previous film Western, in Bulgaria's remote and beautiful mountainous country, where memories of the Balkan wars (and the communist era before that) are still fresh and where there is money to be made and resources to be exploited for those who are ruthless enough."

"As with Western, Grisebach uses nonprofessionals for many very likable supper-and-drinking-and-reminiscing scenes with people gathered round tables shooting the breeze, scenes that don't need a particular reason to exist, other than their easy, garrulous energy. And as before, Grisebach shows an interesting reluctance to conform to conventional narrative templates though while this film actually does conform to Chekhov's ancient rule about what happens to the gun produced in act one (well, act two in this case), the denouement isn't the usual arthouse flourish of violence."

"Veska (Yana Radeva) is a woman running an archaeological dig in Matochina in south-east Bulgaria. Out of the blue, she runs into an old friend (or maybe more than that); this is Said (Syuleyman Alilov Letifov), a man on the fringes of some dodgy business deals who has showed up in the locality (which he hasn't visited for decades) to buy stolen diesel fuel from an up-and-coming local villain nicknamed Raven."

"Said turns down an offer to help with this man's chilling, lucrative people-trafficking network: a growth business for organised crime in this part of central Europe. In fact, Said's appearance here is resented by many locals, who remember his theft of a cigarette shipment in which Veska had been involv"

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