FRED Film Radio - English Channel

Presented as a world premiere in the Quinzaine des Cinéastes at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, “Death Has No Master” marks a new return to Venezuela for director Jorge Thielen Armand. The film centres on Caro, a woman who travels to Venezuela to sell her late father’s cacao plantation and finds the family mansion occupied by its former staff.

Jorge Thielen Armand explains that the film was shot in Venezuela in 2025, with production ending in September of that year. At the time, the country’s political climate was already shaping the atmosphere around the shoot. “There were already the American aircraft boats on the shores,” says Jorge Thielen Armand. “That was creating a climate of uncertainty, fear.”

The director underlines that later events are not directly part of the film, but he acknowledges that audiences may now read the work through Venezuela’s more recent political tensions. For him, that connection is less a matter of topical reference than of atmosphere: a pervasive instability that enters the behaviour of authorities, institutions and private citizens.

The family house is not only a setting in “Death Has No Master”. It functions as a character, a repository of memory and a physical embodiment of decay. Jorge Thielen Armand says this idea runs through all his films, where the house, or the absence of one, becomes a central dramatic force.

For this film, he imagined the walls themselves as unstable. “I always envisioned seeing the walls moving,” says Jorge Thielen Armand. That sensation is created not only through images, but also through sound. The director used material from a 1970s magnetic tape belonging to his family, digitising it and spreading those sounds across the film. The result is a sonic texture that suggests the characters’ psychology and the secret life of the house itself.

The film’s visual identity was developed with cinematographer Luis Armando Arteaga, whom Jorge Thielen Armand describes as more than a director of photography. Their collaboration was not based only on technical decisions, but on conversations about life, cinema and literature. Luis Armando Arteaga was involved at every stage of the process, including the script and subtitles.

The director says the film’s style emerged while they were making it. There were initial ideas, including lens choices and a decision to embrace visual noise, but the cinematography remained open to discovery. The main rule was to shoot largely on a tripod or rails, with exceptions for selected handheld scenes. “The film was guiding us how to shoot it,” says Jorge Thielen Armand, describing a process that combined formal control with a desire for freedom.

The choice of Asia Argento as Caro came first from intuition, not familiarity. Jorge Thielen Armand had not seen her work extensively when her name was suggested, but a photograph was enough to trigger a response. Something in her eyes, he says, convinced him that she could carry the role.

What interested him was not only her acting experience but the history she would bring with her. Asia Argento’s biography, her relationship to cinema, her public life and her personal baggage gave Caro dimensions that could not be written in conventional script terms. “I was especially interested in who she is as a person,” says Jorge Thielen Armand.

Once Asia Argento joined the project, the character changed. The original Caro had been imagined as more delicate, while Asia Argento brought a sharper force to the film. “Asia brought a certain toughness and a certain rock and roll vibe,” says the director. That energy helped him recognise the film’s gothic potential, something he connects to a harsher, almost Goya-like darkness.

“Death Has No Master” originated in part from a recurring dream of an abandoned house or building. For Jorge Thielen Armand, the dream did not provide a simple plot. Instead, it opened a question: what fear was he trying to excavate? The film became a way to enter that fear, rather than explain it.

“I don’t choose the films I make,” says Jorge Thielen Armand. “They choose me.” His return to Venezuela is described as both a curse and a blessing, a compulsion that gives the work its urgency. The journey of making the film, like Caro’s, becomes a descent into a place of pleasure, vice, decay, and catharsis.

Class injustice is central to the film, and Jorge Thielen Armand situates it within Venezuela’s racial and social history. He connects contemporary classism to the caste system imposed during Spanish colonial rule, officially abolished after independence but still present, in his words, in the collective soul of the country.

“Death Has No Master” examines how inherited hierarchies continue to shape relationships, property and violence. For the director, the film is about “the murderous quality of classism” and how inequality can turn people against one another. The conflict around the house and the plantation is therefore not only personal but also historical.

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At the Festival de Cannes 2026, Asia Argento returns with “Death Has No Master”, the new feature by Venezuelan filmmaker Jorge Thielen Armand, presented as a world premiere in the Quinzaine des Cinéastes. The film, also titled “La muerte no tiene dueño”, follows Caro, a woman who travels to Venezuela to sell her late father’s cacao plantation, only to find the family mansion occupied by its former staff.

Asia Argento describes the experience as both destabilising and artistically necessary. Acting in Spanish and spending two months in Venezuela, one dedicated to preparation and one to shooting, placed her in a state of vulnerability that became part of the role. “It made me feel very insecure, not speaking the language,” says the actress. “I used that frustration for my character.”

For Asia Argento, Caro is not simply a woman reclaiming property. She is someone already close to collapse, forced to confront what land, inheritance and family history can conceal. The actress describes the character as marked by entitlement, colonial memory, and an unresolved relation to Venezuela.

“There is this primal animal in me,” says Asia Argento, reflecting on how the film explores the instinctive violence attached to home, property and bloodline. In her reading, “Death Has No Master” examines a basic human impulse: the transformation of grief and inheritance into conflict. The mansion becomes more than a location. It is a place where buried histories return through bodies, rooms, sounds and gestures.

The film’s official synopsis frames this struggle as one that unearths violence embedded in the land and its memory, and Asia Argento connects that idea to a more intimate performance process. She explains that she built an entire past for Caro, including details never shown on screen, to inhabit her instability with precision.

The shoot in Venezuela became, in Asia Argento’s words, an experience of self-imposed isolation. She says she did not go to the beach, restaurants or leisure spaces, choosing instead to remain in her hotel room and reread the script obsessively. “I’m not gonna miss this chance,” says Asia Argento. “So I gave it my all.”

That intensity shaped a performance she now recognises as disturbing and deliberately unguarded. “When I looked at the movie, I was like, wow, I looked really deranged,” she says. The language barrier amplified the unease, the constant evolution of the script, and the atmosphere of the house where rehearsals took place, which she describes as charged with dark energy.

Although Asia Argento initially approached “Death Has No Master” as a political film, she only fully understood its genre dimension after seeing the completed work. With its sound design, photography, blood, tension and psychological disturbance, the film revealed itself to her as a horror-inflected thriller with a 1970s sensibility.

“I had no idea the movie was horror,” says Asia Argento. “When I saw it with the music, with the lights, I understood it’s my turf.” The actress, whose career is deeply connected to genre cinema, identifies the film’s paranormal and psychological texture as part of her own artistic heritage.

The film brings together professional and non-professional performers, a working method familiar to Jorge Thielen Armand. Asia Argento recalls a month of rehearsals in the house, shared meditations and a process that helped the group reach a common rhythm. She was especially struck by Dogreika Tovar, whose natural presence pushed her to find a balance between technique and instinct.

Her relationship with Jorge Thielen Armand was based on hierarchy and trust. After more than 70 films, Argento says she needs a director who knows where the film is going. “He’s the director, I’m the actress,” she says, describing him as precise, opinionated and able to contain her own need for control.

For Asia Argento, returning to Cannes carries personal weight. She admits she thought she might never return, making this invitation a significant moment. The Quinzaine des Cinéastes, she says, remains one of the sections where she looks for the pulse of contemporary cinema.

“I feel in the right place,” says Asia Argento. “I really love directors and art movies. I feel at home.”

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Screening in the Un Certain Regard section of the 79th Cannes Film Festival, “Titanic Ocean” is the new feature by Greek director Konstantina Kotzamani. Set in a Japanese boarding school where teenage girls train to become professional mermaids, performing in aquariums and becoming stars under silicon tails and invented names, the film follows 17-year-old Akame as she learns to hold her breath, discovers first love and undergoes a transformation that goes far beyond performance. What sounds like pure invention is rooted in reality: the schools exist, the trend is massive across Asia, and Kotzamani spent ten years turning this world into a film that weaves together questions of identity, beauty standards, eating disorders and abuse without ever settling into judgement. The result is  a coming-of-age story told through the mythology of sirens.

The project began a decade ago with an article and a photograph: five Japanese girls wearing silicon mermaid tails during a training class. Konstantina Kotzamani was immediately captivated, and as she researched further she discovered an entire universe: girls who train to become mermaids, choose new names, new colors, new personas, and build careers as performers. What drew her in was not the spectacle but the psychological dimension beneath it. “These girls are really creating another identity where they feel much safer. They choose another name, they choose colours, they choose another character, they magnify their body and it’s as if they’re living a parallel virtual reality for who they are”. She wanted the film to explore that fantasy without condemning it.

For Konstantina Kotzamani, the mermaid school is a magnifying glass on something much broader: the condition of contemporary adolescence. The moment of leaving home, she says, can feel like pure freedom but also like hostility, depending on how much confidence you have been given. She recognizes the feeling in her own past, but sees it amplified in today’s young people. “Nowadays young people are even more trapped into this feeling that everything seems unsettling and the world seems dangerous, so people are trapped and a bit more introvert even if they show that they are extrovert”. Social media has doubled the phenomenon, the construction of a public self that bears little relation to the private one is no longer a metaphor. It is daily life.

The sirens of Greek mythology, creatures whose haunting voice lures men into the abyss, gave Konstantina Kotzamani the key to her protagonist’s arc. Akame begins the film unable to speak loudly, unable to voice her needs, her love, her friendships. The entire journey becomes a search for that voice. “I felt that searching for your inner voice could be so powerful. Finding a voice as a girl today, it’s a very nice metaphor. This is what we try to do now: to speak for ourselves and speak loud and have somebody listen to us”.

Setting the film in Japan was the obvious choice, but it came with enormous challenges. It took ten years to finance the project, and Japan’s film industry is not easily open to international co-productions. Once on set, Konstantina Kotzamani had to navigate a culture built on rigid hierarchies where women, she says, are almost always at the lowest part of the scale. “It’s almost unbelievable for a woman to have power in Japan. I had to question many ways myself and how I can exist and persist and insist on what I want as a vision there”. The connection with her lead actress, however, was immediate: a chemistry built on the young performer’s willingness to let go.

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Winner of the L’Œil d’Or for best documentary at the 79th Cannes Film Festival 2026, where it premiered as a Special Screening, Rehearsals for a Revolution is the debut feature by Iranian actress and director Pegah Ahangarani. Built entirely from personal archives, home videos, protest footage, animations and voice recordings, the film traces over four decades of Iranian history through five portraits of people who shaped Pegah Ahangarani‘s life, relatives and mentors whose individual stories mirror the cycles of repression and resistance that have defined the country since 1979. Sentenced to eighteen months in prison in 2013 and a refugee in the United Kingdom since 2022, Pegah Ahangarani turns her own biography into a lens through which a nation’s unfinished revolution comes into focus.

The idea for “Rehearsals for a Revolution” goes back six years, but Pegah Ahangarani knew from the start that she wanted a film made entirely of narration and archival material, with no conventional on-camera interviews. To test whether that approach could sustain itself, she made a short film, “I’m Trying to Remember”, which premiered at IDFA. “That project was successful, and then I made the first chapter of this feature, which premiered at IDFA. Gradually, I gained the confidence that I could carry a 90-minute film forward using this subjective approach of voice and archive as image”.

When the project began, Pegah Ahangarani had no children. Midway through the edit, she discovered she was pregnant, and something shifted. She told her editor, Arash, in secret, and proposed a new dimension for the film. “I told him, ‘I have a secret to confess: I’m pregnant… maybe the film could turn into a sort of letter to my child.’ I didn’t want it to be explicitly a ‘letter-film,’ but I wanted to convey the idea that these are all stories we must tell the next generation”. That impulse, the need to pass memory forward, became the emotional spine of the entire project.

Asked whether the future of Iran lies with its women, Pegah Ahangarani does not hesitate. She points to the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement as something unprecedented in the country’s history. “People took to the streets with a clear demand and brought what they wanted for the future into the present moment. They took off their veils and burned them that very night”. What struck her most was the movement’s intelligence: rather than describing a desired future, the protesters enacted it. Pegah Ahangarani sees this as the most progressive chapter in forty years of uprisings, and she is unequivocal about what it means: if Iran changes, it will be because of its women.

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Presented at the 79th Cannes Film Festival, “Che Guevara: The Last Companions” is the debut feature by Christophe Dimitri Reveille, a documentary that took over twenty years to complete. The film reconstructs the untold aftermath of Che Guevara’s execution in Bolivia in 1967, when his last surviving companions, three Cuban guerrilla fighters, undertook a gruelling 2,400-kilometre escape across Bolivia, hunted by thousands of soldiers. Through rare archival footage, animation and exclusive interviews with the protagonists themselves, as well as members of the Bolivian army and a CIA operative, Christophe Dimitri Reveille pieces together a story that has remained largely invisible for sixty years. At its core, the film asks what revolution means for those who live in its shadow, the people who followed, protected and ultimately lost the man they believed in.

Christophe Dimitri Reveille‘s journey into this story began with a book and a single encounter. In 2004, he met Benigno, one of Che’s closest companions, and spent over two years co-writing his biography. A graphic novel followed, then the idea of a documentary, initially just about Benigno. It was a conversation with Benicio del Toro, who had played Che in Steven Soderbergh‘s film and knew Benigno personally, that shifted the scale of the project. “He was like, ‘You met Benigno, but you’re doing a documentary about Benigno? You should do a documentary about all of them.’ But it’s impossible to meet all of them because even meeting one is hard. But then he put a seed in my brain”. From that point on, Christophe Dimitri Reveille began tracking down every surviving companion, one by one.

To ask the right questions, Christophe Dimitri Reveille immersed himself in every available account of the Bolivian campaign: biographies, military histories, previous interviews. At each stage of the guerrillas’ journey from the death of Guevara to their return to Cuba, he found specialists who had spent a decade or more on a single episode. “I met someone who did huge work about the Bolivian army for 15 years. At each step of the journey, I was able to find five or six people like me who worked 10 years on that specific moment”. Their knowledge helped Christophe Dimitri Reveille to build a fuller picture with every conversation.

In the film, Christophe Dimitri Reveille draws a distinction between what the Bolivians lost and what the Cubans lost when Che was killed. The Bolivian fighters lost a commander. The Cubans lost something far more intimate, a man who had given them purpose when they had nothing, who had been at their side for a decade, and whom they had been sent to protect. “When he died, they fell. They fell politically. They had to go back to Cuba and say to Castro, ‘Sorry, we were supposed to protect him and we failed'”. That first night in the forest after the execution, Christophe Dimitri Reveille says, the Cubans were not just escaping an army, they were walking away from the centre of their lives.

One of the film’s most striking qualities is its refusal to settle on a single version of events. Each companion carries his own Che, his own reading of the revolution, his own account of what went wrong. Christophe Dimitri Reveille embraces this multiplicity without pretending to resolve it. When asked during a funding meeting whether he had found the truth, he answered honestly: “I’m not pretentious. I don’t know the truth, but I can say the truth is somewhere here”. At the end of twenty years, Christophe Dimitri Reveille says, “I have many more questions than answers”.

Asked whether “The Last Companions” is an homage to the unseen figures behind every revolution, Christophe Dimitri Reveille confirms. The film, he says, is for everyone who works in the shadow.

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Hélène Rosselet-Ruiz, already noted for her short films, is one of the contenders for the Caméra d’Or with “Madame”, screened at the 79th Cannes Film Festival as part of the Special Screenings. To discuss this fascinating chamber piece co-written with Pauline Guéna (author of the story behind Dominik Moll’s excellent “The Night of the 12th”) which unfolds (almost) entirely in a private mansion located in the so-called “Golden Triangle”, the most luxurious area in Paris. The French director is joined by her actress Malou Khebizi, who plays Laura, the tough factotum who looks after Souria (played by Soundos Mosbah), the mistress of the Saudi sheikh who lives shut away in this house, in “obscene” luxury (to use the director’s own word) but under surveillance, with only Laura and a man, Emre (Ziad Bakri), for company. The actress tells us more about how she related to the character and approached her complexity.

Hélène Rosselet-Ruiz explains that she experienced the unusual situation of Laura’s character firsthand and actually entered this world we typically never see, after which she carried out extensive research, into the world of servicing luxury clients on one side, and also on cases of Saudi (and other) women who fled such situations, also drawing on the work of sociologist Alizée Delpierre and journalist Hélène Coutard.

Asked about the opposition or symmetry between the characters of Laura and Souria, the director specifies: “What really infused all the writing and the construction of the two characters, these two relationships to being a woman, is the confrontation of two femininities that are pitted against each other but eventually, in both cases, deemed never enough. That is to say, whether you’re a woman who refuses to endorse the trappings of femininity (for example who is into being strong and grounded, as is the case with Laura’s character) or a woman who ‘performs’ a certain hyper-femininity (thus taking on the idea of somehow wearing a mask), well, in both cases, it’s never enough, it’s never right… And I can say I have been both, so I was interested in setting these two face to face, because I think the line is thin between these two ways of ‘performing’ one’s condition.”

As for the character of Souria, and what leads her to accept these living conditions, Hélène Rosselet-Ruiz comments: “I wanted us to discover her little by little, for her not to be a character reduced to the stereotype she invokes. As women, we often accept living conditions, even relationships, that don’t suit us, in the sense that I’ve frequently found myself in situations where as a woman, I’d say to myself, ‘theoretically, I don’t agree with what I’m experiencing, and I don’t think it’s normal.’ And yet, that doesn’t prevent you from accepting these situations… As women, we regularly find ourselves in situations we could question, and yet we are also rooted in them, and it’s an entire journey we have to undertake, a collective journey as women. We need to… break free from these patterns, and having a character like Souria, who is aware of what she’s accepting, and in exchange for what, that interested me.”

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After “I Have Electric Dreams”, which collected three Leopards at Locarno 2022, for best direction, best actress (Daniela Marín Navarro), and best actor (Reinaldo Amien Gutiérrez), Costa Rican-French director Valentina Maurel has just shown her second feature film, “Forever Your Maternal Animal”, in the Un Certain Regard section of the 79th Cannes Film Festival, which owed the three protagonists of the film (Marina De Tavira, Daniela Marín Navarro, Mariangel Villegas) a joint Un Certain Regard Prize for Best Actress. 

On the fact that “Forever Your Maternal Animal” somewhat expands on what she did in her debut, featuring a similar set of characters played by the same actors, Valentina Maurel explains: ‘Of course I always talk about family relationships, because for me it is the place where you know yourself the less… because you build yourself a life, you try to control something of your life, and then when you go back to the country you come from or to your family, there’s always something completely strange – you’re caught up in dynamics that are completely blurry...’ ‘This time,’ she adds, ‘I wanted [to pair that subject] with the fact that when you are a Latin-American person who lives in Europe, you also feel very estranged from your own country because you easily start believing that Europe is actually the centre of the world – even if you don’t want to, but this is the sensation you have, and that your own country is a very peripheral place in the world. That, and you also feel estranged in your own family.’

On the fact that the film is not linear and that the viewer, not quite knowing what it is going to be about, happily let’s him- or herself be immersed in the urban environment of San José (in the neighbourhood where the director was raised) and the somewhat haphazard criss-crossing trajectories of the members of this disconcerted family where each one is going through a bit of an existential crisis: ‘I like that kind of structure, because it feels like life – you just go through it and you don’t really know where it’s gonna take you. And then at some moments of your life, you can grasp [a hint of meaning], but then you forget about it and you go through life again...’ Maurel also points out that everything is determined by the characters: ‘I think characters are enough, sometimes, to make a film.’

On the title, borrowed on a whim from one of her own mother’s poems, Valentina Maurel confesses: ‘I felt like this title had a secret meaning for me, and now when I see the film, I realise the title has a secret relation with the film which is not obvious, but important.’ She adds: ‘I can never find titles for my films. I used to think it was a problem, but now I think it’s okay: you cannot explain my films through a title. It’s difficult to pitch, but I think I like that.’ ‘“Forever your maternal animal” means, she continues, that no matter what happens, I will be your mother, and that’s beautiful and comforting, but I think it also feels almost like a threat – a threat to the daughter, who doesn’t want to have her mother forever attached to her life, or maybe a threat to oneself as a mother: you don’t wanna be forever a mother… Motherhood has something that is imprisoning for the one who has to carry this responsibility but also for the one who has to be the object of this responsibility… So I wanted to talk about these things without [formulating] a definitive message.’

On the character of the little sister, Amalia, and her brand of rebellion: ‘[She’s] a character who wants to escape the certainties her sister has about what is good in life – in the same way you want to escape your mother’s certainties –, but also the success model of a certain intellectual middle class that thinks that if you want to succeed in life, you have to study, that you can believe in God or the illuminati but not both, because these things are contradictory, and I think this also represents also a way of thinking that Elsa has, because she studied in Europe and because she is very far from what is also a Latin American culture that negotiates with reality in more flexible way. [Latin America] is a very religious place – like Europe, indeed, but it’s a religion of a softer kind, which hasn’t been contaminated by secular things and allows itself more manifestations of spirituality, of the unreal … Amalia wants her freedom, and her freedom is to go in the opposite direction of where a bourgeois education wants her to go.’

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Sarah Arnold’s debut feature, “Too Many Beasts”, set in a countryside teeming with wild boars, angry hunters and local authorities catering for their own needs, is a biting, surprisingly funny and rather exhilarating thriller revolving around a local police investigation on a gruesome murder, presented at the Directors’ Fortnight of the 79th Cannes Film Festival. The film features finely tuned, witty dialogues recited by a top-shelf ensemble led by a priceless Alexis Manenti as the initially taciturn and heartbroken but sharply observant Corsican newcomer at the police station, and the unfailingly badass Ella Rumpf as a police psychologist with whom he has to have regular meetings and immediately reassures him, when he asks if he shouldn’t talk to a make therapist, by saying, ‘don’t worry, I’m just as incompetent as a man.’

“Too Many Beasts” was awarded the Europa Cinemas Label.

About the setup, the French director says she thought it was ‘a great way to talk about class conflict,’ and said she was trying to play with the codes of the kind of film men would make, especially American men – citing “Fargo”, “Inherent Vice” and “True Detective” as references –, and give them an absurd slant, seeing as she is a woman making a film in a specific area of a much smaller country.

Sarah Arnold tells us more about the character of Fulda, and explains why she wanted to meld the therapy element with the investigation. She also underlines the unpredictability of the situation and talks about the fact that many characters here are in fact quite ill-adapted within this society.

On subverting gender-related stereotypes within a traditionally male context, Sarah Arnold says she wanted to make it difficult, for the viewer, ‘to identify exactly who each of these people is, where the desire is,’ pointing out that if you blur things for the viewer, ‘if they don’t know what to expect, then you can be free.’

On the fact that her quirky characters – and the subverted gender stereotypes – represent a form of rebellion against the set order, Sarah Arnold mentions, ‘This is what we wanted to feel, while we were working on this project: that there is a possibility of staying free and that we have to stand, all together… I’m not an activist, but I have a lot of respect for these people, who dedicate their lives to fighting. I made this film so as not to forget that we have to disobey.‘

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Actress-turned-director and known feminist activist Judith Godrèche tells us more about her adaptation of fellow-activist Annie Ernaux‘ 2016 novel, presented in the Un Certain Regard section of the 79th Cannes Film Festival.

Judith Godrèche explains why she wanted the Nobel Prize-winning author to be included in the film, to be “a character too”. We discuss the shame her main character Annie, in 1958, feels about things she feels responsible for when she isn’t – “She’s carrying the weight of that and it impacts her body, and it impacts her future and her vision of her future“. We also discuss the role of Annie’s mother in her gradual path towards emancipation through studying – “She did not want Annie to clean the house, she did not want to teach Annie how to iron… Annie’s mum was a very important leader and wanted Annie to study so she wouldn’t get married, have kids. Even in her mum, there was a thirst for independence“.

The French director details her approach of the central trauma and of the intimate scenes, underlining that the banality of it, at the time, had to be represented too. She also recounts what led her to casting her own daughter Tess Barthélemy to play Annie, and points out that it felt very important to her that she would discover the job of actress in the best possible conditions.

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In competition at the 79th Cannes Film Festival, “The Dreamed Adventure” marks Valeska Grisebach’s return to Bulgaria after “Western”. Set in Svilengrad, a town on the Bulgarian border, the film follows Veska, an archaeologist, as her encounter with Said, an old acquaintance whose car has been stolen, pulls her into a hidden network of criminal ties beneath the town’s apparently quiet surface.

Grisebach explained that her earlier experience in Bulgaria left her with the sense that the country still held stories she needed to understand.

“I realised how limited my knowledge about Europe is,” she said. “Europe has so many different faces, and in Bulgaria Europe can feel very different than in Germany.”

For Grisebach, the film also arises from a personal reckoning with European history. Raised in West Berlin, she felt deeply connected to the generational experience of 1989, yet increasingly aware of how differently that turning point was lived across the continent.

“We are connected by that changing moment in Europe,” she said, “but also divided by the different experiences that followed.”

The director described The Dreamed Adventure as a collaborative project rather than an external gaze placed upon Bulgaria.

“I had doubts because I am a German director,” she admitted. “Who is telling whose story? But once I was in contact with people, those doubts began to disappear.”

The title “The Dreamed Adventure” carries, for Grisebach, a deliberate ambiguity. It connects the film to adventure cinema and to the Western genres traditionally coded as male and often built around strength, conquest and survival.

“Adventure was a link to genre,” she explained. “I was interested in having a woman look into that genre, then step into it.”

The “dreamed” aspect also refers to the 1990s, a decade the director sees as filled with promises, desires and unresolved contradictions.

“It was a time full of dreams,” she said, “but also an ambivalent time, because many dreams were not fulfilled.”

At the centre of the film is Veska, a woman who observes before acting. Her profession as an archaeologist becomes essential to the film’s method: she reads surfaces, studies traces and looks for meaning in details others overlook.

For Grisebach, this attentiveness was crucial: “The gaze was very important to me,” she said. “Who owns the gaze?”

The director linked this question to her own relationship with genre cinema. “I have internalised a male gaze, also through genre films,” she reflected. “For me, it was interesting, and sometimes difficult, to bring a woman in motion in a film.”

Rather than claiming to rewrite cinematic language, Grisebach described her approach as an interaction with existing traditions. “I wouldn’t say rewriting,” she concluded. “Filmmaking has so much to do with getting in contact with something.”

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