The Dreamed Adventure, German writer-director Valeska Grisebach‘s gritty Bulgarian-set gangster drama that won the Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, has been selected to represent Bulgaria in the 2027 Oscar Best International Feature Film race.
The film takes place in Svilengrad, a small Bulgarian town near the borders with Türkiye and Greece. The story revolves around Veska (Yana Radeva), who crosses paths with Said (Syuleyman Letifov), an old acquaintance whose car has been stolen. She brings him along to an excavation site where she is working as an archaeologist and eventually is pulled into Said’s shady world of organized crime that exists under the surface.
As Deadline’s Damon Wise said in his review from Cannes, the “remarkable piece of work” recalls “the pitiful last days of the dying communist era and the violent, mafia-style economics that whooshed in to replace them.”
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He called the film “tremendous,” saying the realist drama “homes in on a drab lawless town on the Bulgaria-Turkey border and somehow instills it with all the paranoid danger of Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil.”
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This year’s selection was made by a five-member committee led be chairman Mira Staleva with members Savina Petkova, The White Lotus actor Julian Kostov, Pavel G. Vesnakov and Kalin Kalinov. It is a co-production of Germany, France, Bulgaria and Austria.
The Bulgarian National Film Center said that The Dreamed Adventure “was entirely shot in Bulgaria with unprofessional actors, and the action is developed among Bulgarian characters and in Bulgarian.” It added that Griezebach spent five years exploring the region to make her sophomore feature (after 2017’s Western).
Janus Films has U.S. rights to the pic, which next screens tonight in the Toronto Film Festival’s Centerpiece lineup before playing later this month at the New York Film Festival.
Bulgaria has never advanced to the nomination stage in the Oscar category; its best effort was reaching the shortlist in the 2009 race for Stephan Komandarev’s The World Is Big and Salvation Lurks Around the Corner.
This year’s 15-film Oscar shortlist in the international feature category will be revealed December 15, with Oscar nominations to be announced January 21, 2027.
The 98th Oscars ceremony will take place on March 14, 2027 at the Dolby Theater in Hollywood.
