Janus Films has acquired all North American rights to German filmmaker Valeska Grisebach’s Bulgaria-set The Dreamed Adventure just days after its award-winning world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival.

The final Palme d’Or contender to play in Cannes’ 2006 edition last Friday, Grisebach’s borderlands drama kept the wind in the sales of the main competition right up to the end, and went on to win the Jury Prize.

Deadline critic Damon Wise proclaimed the film “a remarkable piece of work, a realist drama that 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.”

The Dreamed Adventure is Grisebach’s fourth feature after Western, which premiered in Cannes Un Certain Regard in 2017, and later won the German Film Critics’ Award for Best Feature Film.

In the new film, Yana Radeva stars as an archaeologist working on a dig in Svilengrad, a small town on the Bulgarian border. She crosses paths with Said (Syuleyman Letifov), an old acquaintance whose car has been stolen. Offering help, she brings him along to her excavation site.

As they reconnect, Veska is pulled into Said’s shady world and a personal excavation of a different kind into the criminal ties that lurk beneath the surface of this seemingly innocent town on the edge of Europe.

The Dreamed Adventure was produced by Komplizen Film in co-production with Grisebach, Kazak Productions, Miramar Film, Panama Film, New Matter Films, ARTE France Cinéma and ZDF/ARTE.

The deal was negotiated by Janus Films and The Match Factory. Janus will announce theatrical release plans in the coming weeks.