Stever’s 'I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming' Premieres at Locarno
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Isabelle Stever directs 'I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming,' a German-Ukrainian co-production shot in Ukraine that centers on a transgender couple’s evacuation from Kyiv, blending wartime realism with intimate gender exploration.
- Anna Melikova, Stever’s screenwriter and wife, shaped the script from her pre-invasion writing on queer relationships, later reworking it to reflect the war’s impact on identity and displacement.
- Tania Myronyshena and Markus Bright, non-professional leads with lived experience—she a war journalist, he a transgender activist—bring raw authenticity to their roles as Olya and Oleh.
- Volodymyr Usyk, cinematographer known for war documentaries including 'Songs of Slow Burning Earth,' applies an observational, slow-burn visual style that heightens the film’s emotional dissociation.
- Mykhailo Zakutskyi, sound artist behind acclaimed documentaries like 'Intercepted' and 'Timestamp,' crafts a somber, immersive soundscape that underscores the film’s psychological tension.
- I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming premiered at the 2026 Locarno Film Festival and will screen at the 2026 New York Film Festival’s Main Slate, marking a rare fiction feature from Ukraine in international circulation.
Why it matters: The film’s grounding in lived Ukrainian experience—through its crew, leads, and Melikova’s writing—offers a materially distinct perspective from most Western war narratives: it centers queer identity not as a subplot but as core to the experience of displacement, making its emotional and moral stakes immediate and specific, not abstract.
Ask SkimNews
