Cannes 2026: The Dreamed Adventure, Too Many Beasts, Women on Trial, Che Guevara: The Last Companions

Valeska Grisebach’s “Western,” shown in Un Certain Regard in 2017, was one of the standouts of that year’s Cannes: an unconventional drama that revolved around the disconnect between German workers building a power plant in rural Bulgaria and the locals. The film put its own spin on the frontier genre—the German and Bulgarian characters don’t speak the same language, so clear communication isn’t a given—while also reflecting on the politics of the European Union.

It’s been nine long years, but Grisebach has been deservedly elevated to competition with **“The Dreamed Adventure,” **an extreme slow burn (167 minutes) that is also set in Bulgaria, in a border region. At first, the story seems to concern Said (Syuleyman Letifov), who at the outset is shown driving across the border into Turkey. He appears to be playing both sides of a local turf war between gangsters in the drug- and fuel-smuggling business.

Said has a chance run-in with Veska (Yana Radeva), an archeologist he’s worked with before. She’s digging at a site in the border village of Matochina, Bulgaria (one character suggests that archeologists are bigger thieves than the gangsters). Grisebach’s focus shifts to her, especially once Said ominously vanishes. Veska grew up in nearby Svilengrad, Bulgaria, and has a past with Iliya (Stoicho Kostadinov), the reigning gangland kingpin, who is under threat from a newcomer called the Raven.

Exactly where Veska’s allegiances lie becomes an open question for Iliya and for the town. It’s not a question that “The Dreamed Adventure” chooses to answer in a conventional dramatic arc. Rather, the film unfolds as a complex, ever-shifting reflection on memory, regional history, and trust in a lawless context. Veska is kind to Iliya’s young daughter and grows close with a former thief (Velko Frandev).

The seemingly aimless first hour does crucial work in terms of establishing the setting, which the protagonist is at various points forced to traverse on foot instead of by car. (Partly as a goodwill gesture, Iliya orders the potholes by Veska’s excavation site repaired.) “The Dreamed Adventure” is clearly one of the most unusual and considered works in competition, worthy of a second viewing with foreknowledge of where it ends up.

The festival is coming to a close, which means it’s time to write up a few titles that I didn’t fit in anywhere else.

The French filmmaker Bruno Dumont had one of the highlights of Directors’ Fortnight with “Red Rocks,” and Sarah Arnold’s first feature, “Too Many Beasts,” in the same program, feels like a companion piece; its dark but wacky humor bears a similarity to Dumont’s recent, tongue-in-cheek output. The plot concerns a possible serial killer of wild boars and a missing murderer, who may or may not be the same person. The crimes are investigated by a protocol-averse detective (Alexis Manenti) and his workplace therapist (Ella Rumpf, from “Raw”). It’s the sort of comedy that seemed to have French speakers laughing a bit more loudly than everyone else, so it’s possible that some of the humor was lost in translation.

Cannes always presents a handful of films aimed squarely at a French audience, and **“Women on Trial” **(in Special Screenings) plays very much like the Gallic equivalent of something like the Ruth Bader Ginsburg biopic “On the Basis of Sex.” Charlotte Gainsbourg stars as Gisèle Halimi, a Tunis-born French lawyer who in 1972 defended a 16-year-old rape victim’s right to have had an abortion, a procedure that was not legalized in France until 1975. The movie, directed by Lauriane Escaffre and Yvo Muller, does a polished, solid-enough job dramatizing a multi-pronged strategy for winning the case, which included attention to optics and the press.

The documentary **“Che Guevara: The Last Companions” **(in Special Screenings), directed by Christophe Dimitri Réveille, features interviews with associates of Guevara who continued fighting for his cause in Bolivia after he was executed in 1967. The former guerrillas share details from their physically demanding journey through wild areas of the country. One describes escaping soldiers who were tracking them, only to risk returning to retrieve a dog that had been tagging along with the group.

In general, the film comes across as more of a blotter-style account of events than a broader reflection informed by the distance of the years. We learn at the end that at least one of the men interviewed, Benigno (the nom de guerre of Dariel Alarcón Ramírez), became anti-Castro later on. (He also died in 2016—this documentary has been in the works for a long time.) “The Last Companions” is narrated by Vincent Lindon, the festival jury president in 2022, and his participation more than anything else may explain why this dry if historically interesting compendium of talking heads and animated sequences turned up in Cannes.