How did you decide upon the town of Svilengrad as a setting and what was it that caught your eye?

For this story I was interested in the concept of the border as a surface of projection, as a heightened, timeless, adventurous space that is continually at the center of narratives. A mysterious place of movement, of trade and smuggling, of escape, sometimes lonely and isolated, then again at the center of attention. As a signifier, the border is full of ambivalence: it speaks of the yearning to cross it, of connection, but simultaneously of the brutality of boundaries and the fear of the unknown. During our research for The Dreamed Adventure we got a lot closer to the border and the people who live near it. Also to the knowledge of what it implies, such as the need to participate in the incredible flow of trade across the EU’s external border via a small business, “Dalavera” – wanting a piece of the cake, which is understandable.

Svilengrad came as a surprise. As we kept driving east during our research, always along the border, this town was one of our destinations, but as with many of the blind spots along my journey I hadn’t known until then that Kapitan Andreevo, near Svilengrad, is the busiest border checkpoint in Europe and the second busiest in the world. Anything that enters Europe from Türkiye and the Near East will take this route along the old Silk Road. So it’s a point of vital strategic importance for Europe, politically and economically speaking. In the film this large, modern checkpoint is only seen from a distance. The focus is more on the places next to it, such as the old country road on which all border traffic used to flow before the highway was built. Places that still exist, that tell us a lot about the past, but that now live in shadow. We probably would have kept driving anyway, if someone hadn’t told me of a woman nicknamed the “Angel of Svilengrad”. Meeting her, and then several other very impressive women afterwards, caused us to return again and again, until we ended up shooting there.

Were these encounters the inspiration for the main character, Veska?

I had brought an initial idea for the female main character with me, but these encounters with many women, not only from Svilengrad, were essential for me while writing the character Veska. I mean, there’s always this mysterious conglomerate that gives rise to a story and its characters. There’s an intention, a vague idea, which is enriched by life and many other things. I was very impressed by the women of Svilengrad, who were often businesswomen, very savvy, who had experienced a lot along the EU’s external border during their lifetimes and been shaped by it. Women who, during the 90s for example, weren’t in the limelight but got a lot of stuff done, who had to take a beating here and there, who sometimes won a lot but also knew that from one day to the next you could lose everything. Women who experienced true inflation in 1996. I was impressed by their survival strategies, their pragmatism, but also their attentiveness, their willingness to help, their sense of humor in the everyday, to not let themselves get screwed over. They were inspiring encounters, not only for the film but also privately, and one can learn a lot from these women.

Veska being an archeologist was a gift that just landed in my lap during research. If I’d come up with that idea alone at my desk, it would have seemed far too obvious. I was considering a number of different professions. And then one day a man from the area, who has since become a friend, drove us to Matochina, a village right by the Turkish border, in his Jeep. There was the fortress of Bukelon, dating from late antiquity and the early middle ages, which a group of archeologists from Sofia were working on, and that was it for me. On site, in communication with the archeological team, it became entirely plausible that Veska could be an archeologist and thereby add something more to the story’s potential. 

What I liked about the excavation site was the motif of community. It’s a place where people from different social strata come together, but who all share a relationship to what’s hidden underground. Veska is the boss, but also part of this group. I liked the precision, observation and calm that goes into this work, the perceptiveness and the importance of small details, which I found very auspicious for the character.

To what extent did genre influence the development of the character of Veska?

While I was working on Western, I felt genre as a very “strong” narrative form. Originally I had wanted the female characters to interact with genre in other ways. In Western I found this hard to implement without narratively placing them in a naïve kind of competition with the male hero. As a result, I stuck with a rather classical role assignment for the female characters. It felt as though there wasn’t enough space for them.

In dealing with genre I also realized how hard it is for me, Valeska the director, to set a female character in motion, how seemingly in spite of myself I tend to overemphasize and rate more highly the values of the mysterious male hero, his way of taking action, the camera’s view of him. After Western it became clear to me that a woman needed to be the story’s main character.

If we regard genre as an architectural space that we’ve all internalized, the subtext for me has always been the image of a woman who watches from the wings and then suddenly enters the stage. In this context, I thought about the motifs of watching and desiring. Who watches whom? What is it like when the woman, who traditionally is the one being watched, watches back with her desire in play? I see Veska as a character who perceives, watches and makes certain decisions on that basis. I absolutely did not want to create a victim narrative but to show her autonomy and resistance, which sprang out of the life experience of the women I’d met.

It‘s interesting how strongly the filmic narrative, especially genre as a traditionally male-coded form, seeks out conflict. It practically screams for the climactic duel to bring closure. I thought a lot about how to narrate the power dynamics that are being negotiated there – strength/weakness, top/bottom – without succumbing to the pull of plot.

How do you view the relation between trauma and longing in Veska’s story?

I am very respectful of traumatic experiences, but I also felt shy of overusing the word trauma while developing the story because it builds up so much narrative pressure, it classifies things sometimes to such a degree that I almost felt it was intrusive towards the characters to burden them with this term. It was a challenge to find out how to narrate something like traumatic experiences without suddenly concentrating everything upon that. After all, life consists of so many other moments and many people who have lived through great pain go through life very vigorously.

During my research of the post-reunification period I found many narratives of powerful men, of mafiosi or their helpers, who if a woman caught their fancy would simply grab her off the street or out of a night club for a day or more. Narratives of women to whom this has happened or who fought back against these attempts at treating them as “fair game” and luckily escaped. I found it very moving that in the analogy of the 90s as a period “almost like wartime”, the roles of men and women were suddenly very clearly demarcated. It was the associative equation: war + woman = rape.

Of course this is just a snippet from the post-reunification period. The 90s are obviously much more diverse and can’t be reduced to this single point, but it was a narrative I kept encountering, and so it became clear very quickly that it would be part of the film. I found it important for the film to embed the experience of sexualized violence in a collective context, that this story not just happens to one person and thereby stigmatizes her.

I can absolutely understand that even during a time when nights officially belonged to men, you still wanted to go out and have fun in spite of the danger: to share in the excitement, the power, the economy as well as the desire, the sexuality that were being negotiated. Even as a gesture of empowerment, of resistance. In the film Veska is an adult woman, at a completely different stage in her life, and with much more to her past than a youth spent in this border town. There’s a lot that we as the audience can never know, only surmise.

How did your extensive research give rise to the story and the screenplay?

I think I could research for decades on end. For this film it was five years, a small team of three women traveling to Bulgaria over and over to research and prepare. A project always begins with topics and questions, not a finished plot but rather fragments that become a living “something” during research, a something that changes via encounters with people and places. Researching, casting and thinking through the story always go hand in hand. At a certain point I then have to classically sit and write things down, which is very exciting but also a process I have difficulties with. For me writing is about linking subtexts and translating them into plot, during which process I’m always interested in the relation between plot fragments and atmosphere, the topic of suspense. Also when to obfuscate plot and when to put one’s cards on the table and point the way via easily recognizable dramaturgic signs.

Several people played an important role during this process: for five years, my assistants Rita Kudrina and Henrike Meyer accompanied me on research journeys where we experienced and processed many things together. During the writing process, filmmaker Lisa Bierwirth joined me as a co-author. She’d also previously worked with me on Western and we’ve shared a lively interexchange about our projects for years. I was involved as a consultant and co-producer on her film Le Prince and I regard her as a true “partner in crime”. Together we journeyed towards the end of the story’s construction. Our collaboration is a very precious experience for me and I’m deeply grateful for it.

As in your previous films, you once again worked exclusively with non-professional actors. What does the work on set look like in concrete terms?

It has a lot to do with storytelling. A screenplay exists, but it looks like a prose text. I want to avoid that moment of “learning by heart” because it can stand in the way of feeling and common sense. Then I myself have to put the book to one side and everything gets negotiated verbally and “handed over”, as in: the scene, the dialog. The actors take over the dialog, make it their own, which can result in changes to the text at certain points. There is an amalgamation, the actors bringing their life experience and knowledge to bear on the roles, which is a great boon. Of course there are also moments of improvisation, but that’s not the fundamental marker of our collaboration. There’s always some trial and error involved in shooting a scene, and in building upon what’s already filmed. It’s an associative process.

I’ve known most members of the team for several years beforehand, and there was a smooth transition between the casting and rehearsal stages. The time we’ve spent together is our capital during filming. In rehearsal we delve into scenes that often don’t have a direct relation to the script but a preliminary one, serving to establish relationships, make friendships more palpable, and to accustom the actors to both the camera and the audience.

How did you and your long-standing cinematographer Bernhard Keller develop the film’s visual concept? 

Bernhard and I don’t break down the entire film beforehand. We talk about the film’s feeling, atmosphere, rhythm, locations, focal lengths, even focal lengths in relation to the actors as well as the movement in the film. Out of these conversations springs something like a throughline for principal photography, which is then refined on location when dealing with the motif, or during rehearsals with the actors. At the start of a day of shooting we have an initial sketch of a sequence of images, which may subsequently change depending on the needs of a scene and how it develops.

The characters’ movement should guide us through the narrative, smoothly and colloquially, but also in connection with inconspicuously heightened staged moments. So here too it was about the contrast between supposed naturalness, something that almost comes across as documentary-like, and on the other hand images whose composition reminds us of the adventure and western genres. We dug into the way in which the film’s many different locations, which to some extent follow upon one another elliptically, give rise to a filmic space we can trust. A particular challenge were the group scenes, with many people sitting at a table. Here we had to synchronize the scene as scripted, the actors’ performances, and the camera, in order to then, via the editing process, arrive at something that still felt light-footed – a scene that appears as though it arose naturally out of the moment. I admire how Bernhard integrates himself into the events with his camera, almost sitting at the table himself, surrendering himself to these long takes and repetitions while still managing to find their form.

Bernhard has a strong radar for when something is too intentional or made-up. He feels the pressure of aesthetics or wanting too much, which I appreciate a lot. I also appreciate how he accepts the challenge of an open-ended way of working, which also calls for a lot of intuition and quick decision making on his part. With each film we’ve made together the camera has become more mobile, our technical possibilities have changed and so have we. Each project has its own needs.

You also share a long-term collaboration with your editor, Bettina Böhler. What does your editing process look like?

There’s something magical about working with Bettina. I’m always moved by how our conversations about the film and its subtexts suddenly translate themselves into the edit and bring the film to life, step by step. It’s truly exciting to watch how precisely, empathetically, and totally without fear she handles images and sound while editing. Over the course of several films we’ve worked out our method: step one, I create a rough cut, something like a sketch, this time in collaboration with the young editor Jil Lange. Bettina then works on this cut solo, adapting as she sees fit, before we spend a long time together in the editing suite. Here, as from the very beginning of the project, the object is to find out how this film functions. The basic structure is clear, but producing the film in its materiality such that it gives rise to the fluency of a narrative, coherently and smoothly, is a whole process. Achieving this as an editor is an incredible creative effort.

All in all, „The Dreamed Adventure“ is also a (cautious) love story. How did this come about?

For me it was clear from the start that there would be a love story in this film. Especially with regards to the constellation of the characters: the fact that Said guides us into the film and Veska takes over the story after his disappearance. I liked the idea of seeing the two as survivors of a complicated era and that apart from the roles ascribed to men and women, or in opposition to them, there is also a recognition one of the other, the possibility of an understanding. I liked that these were two adults meeting one another, with all their wounds.

In that sense, love is extremely important for the story. All around us, including in the film itself, there are so many warlike narratives about power and powerlessness, valuations of strength and weakness, top and bottom, who’s the winner. During research I met so many people who somehow rise to the occasion of their everyday lives with such openness and just carry something so different within them than all that violent momentum. So it was important for me that all this belligerence be contrasted with a different narrative of friendship and solidarity. I don’t so much mean romantic love as the love that expresses itself in empathy, being open to another person and trying to understand them.