Stever's Queer Wartime Drama Premieres at Locarno
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- "I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming" premiered at the 2026 Locarno Film Festival and is slated for the Main Slate of the 2026 New York Film Festival, with the film currently seeking U.S. distribution.
- Director Isabelle Stever and screenwriter Anna Melikova co-created the film as a German production predominantly shot in wartime Ukraine, with Melikova — Stever's Ukrainian wife and a Crimea-born curator and novelist — writing the screenplay based on her own work.
- Tania Myronyshena and Markus Bright anchor the film as Olya and Oleh, both non-professional leads: Myronyshena is a Kyiv Independent war journalist, and Bright is a transgender co-founder of The Third Place, an NGO for autistic adults.
- The border-crossing setpiece turns Oleh's transgender documents into a structural obstacle, with bewildered male officers handing the couple off to female officers who outrageously treat Oleh's gender identity as a "psychiatric diagnosis" to dodge military service.
- Cinematographer Volodymyr Usyk and sound artist Mykhailo Zakutskyi bring documentary-honed technique from acclaimed Ukrainian war films including "Songs of Slow Burning Earth," "Intercepted," "Divia" and "Timestamp."
- The reviewer frames the film as Stever's brightest to date — a departure from her usual ascetic distance — because Melikova's intimate screenplay and Ukrainian crew connections lend the fiction an experiential sincerity rooted in wartime reality.
Why it matters: For U.S. distributors weighing Locarno-to-NYFF art-house acquisitions, the film offers a festival-circuit-friendly package: a German production with an A-list festival pedigree, a topical Ukraine war backdrop at a moment when such stories face "fatigue," and non-professional leads whose lived identities (a transgender autistic-rights advocate and a war journalist) double as the press story. The Melikova-Stever creative partnership and the film's Berlin-School craft applied to Ukrainian material make it a credible specialty pickup in a year when wartime Ukrainian fiction is described as vanishingly rare.
