Highlights from Week Two of the New York Film Festival

“Red Rocks” is no “Bugsy Malone”; these children aren’t imitating adults. The story and dialogue, written by Dumont, are carefully constructed, but his child actors experience the scripted events freely, in terms of their own personalities and reactions. That’s what Dumont does with adult actors, too, in his greatest films—whether working with amateurs, as he often does, or filming floridly theatrical professionals. But here, keeping the camera close to these five-year-olds, he makes their childhood—and the essence of childhood itself—into the subject of his film, just as much as the scripted story is.

The performances he elicits in “Red Rocks” are as documentary-impulsive as they are dramatically apt. Class relations figure prominently. One child lives in a small modern house, another in a mobile home; when a third is found to live in a gated villa, Géo asks, through the bars of the gate, “Why are you locked in?” (as opposed to wondering why he’s locked out). The heart of the film is romanticism of a rare brazenness, raised to melodramatic fury by the children’s spontaneity and Dumont’s images of a nature-mad frenzy to match. The story’s most sophisticated elements coalesce with the kids’ ingenuously profound view of the world they’re discovering, in all its daily strangeness, as when Eve both jealously and curiously asks Géo about Manon, “What are you like with her?” At a train station, watching him strut proudly away, she gazes wonderingly upon him, the sun silhouetting her and illuminating wisps of her long hair blowing in the breeze.

It’s worth adding that, after seeing the film, I stumbled across a few recent French interviews with Dumont, and the making of “Red Rocks” turns out to have been as extraordinary as the film itself. It was a guerrilla shoot, carefully planned but done on location without permits in scattered bits and pieces, with handheld cameras pressing close to the children and getting ecstatic closeups on the wing. Plenty of artifice and simulation are involved, too—essential for keeping the children safe—but they don’t interfere with the film’s quasi-documentary precision in evoking local life. Regardless of Dumont’s meticulously realized visual tricks, the wild and jubilant audacity of the film’s creation is evident onscreen.

Melodrama and documentary fuse in a drastically different way in “The Dreamed Adventure,” a memory-rich and passion-stoked tale of love and history by the German director Valeska Grisebach. The movie is set in Bulgaria, in an area near its borders with Greece and Turkey, a criminal badlands of smuggling and human trafficking. There, a middle-aged, small-time operator named Said (Syuleyman Letifov) bumps into Veska (Yana Radeva), a long-ago friend, perhaps even a lover, who’s now an archeologist on a dig in the region’s remote hills. She offers him a ride and, by chance, soon finds herself caught up in his criminal dealings. Learning that gangland activities in the area also impinge on her dig, she insinuates herself into the area’s underworld and gets entangled with some of its more colorful figures.

This is a modern-day film noir, plotted tensely and filled with the breathless thrills of dangerous games and risky business, but it offers more than the familiar pleasures of the genre, because of the people Veska encounters. In this chaotic border zone, the boundary between legitimate business and dirty dealings turns out to be ambiguous, for reasons rooted in historical turmoil. In Bulgaria’s post-Communist nineteen-nineties, when the country suddenly lurched from stifled East to Wild West, life in the region shifted sharply from torpid endurance to desperate survivalism. Stories of that time emerge in extended scenes of group dialogue that arise from Veska’s intrepid inquiries. Functioning like an oral historian or a reporter, she speaks with elders in the murky milieu and elicits their scathing, bitterly candid accounts of those disorientingly anarchic times. I have no idea whether these sequences are scripted, cast, and performed or whether Grisebach indeed brought locals together to tell their tales. Either way, they’re persuasively documentary in their tone and their substance, and the vitality of the narratives that come to the surface gives the movie’s overt, genre-tinged fictions an awe-inspiring authenticity.