Winner: Jury Prize, 2026 Cannes Film Festival

Bulgaria’s entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 2027 Academy Awards

In a mountainous Bulgarian border region, amidst a turf war between gangsters involved in smuggling, we meet Said (Syuleyman Letifov), a man living on the fringes of society, crossing into Turkey with a cargo of diesel. There, he encounters a former colleague, Veska (Yana Radeva), an archaeologist who grew up not far from the dusty site. Veska has a past with both Said and local kingpin, Ilya (Stoicho Kostadinov), whose underground business is facing competition from a newcomer called Raven. After turning down Raven’s offer to help with a lucrative and expanding people-trafficking network, Said (and his car) are nowhere to be found, and Veska, whose past includes associating with uncouth networks, takes it upon herself to sell the contraband materials that Said was bootlegging. At the same time, she intends to confront Ilya, whose illegal dealings threaten to involve a teenage girl working on her site. These plot points, dreamed, or, as real as it gets, are blips in something bigger and more nebulous taking place inside this masterful slow-burn, which unearths the past and along with it, memory, local lore, regional history, as well as unspoken and ever-shifting rules of engagement that a passerby could miss with the blink of an eye.

Garnering the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, Valeska Grisebach’s gritty knockout is shot by Bernhard Keller (who previously collaborated with the auteur on WESTERN. In the words of Pedro Calderón de la Barca (circa 1635): What is life? A frenzy. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a fiction, and the greatest good is small; for all of life is a dream and dreams themselves are but dreams.

—Dorota Lech, Toronto International Film Festival guide