Stever's War-Reshaped Queer Film Premieres at Locarno — SkimNews
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- "I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming" premiered at the Locarno Film Festival, marking director Isabelle Stever's return to Locarno after her debut "Gisela" played the Filmmakers of the Present section in 2005.
- Anna Melikova's Berlinale Kompagnon Fellowship-winning script, originally about how gender transition impacts a couple, was forced to evolve into a story about how war interrupts those lives after Russia's 2022 full-scale invasion.
- Isabelle Stever and Melikova expanded shooting in Kyiv beyond their original plan of "only a few small scenes" there with the rest in Germany, citing authenticity over convenience.
- Non-professional leads Markus Bright (a transgender man) and Tania Myronyshena (a journalist at the Kyiv Independent) were cast in Kyiv — Bright through a festival jury connection in five minutes, Myronyshena via Instagram doomscrolling.
- The cast and crew learned to "work and sleep through the air alarms" over three months of production, with drone sounds forcing one early scene to move indoors for safety.
- Stever and Melikova frame the film's "seemingly conventional" ending as "a question" about categorization, dignity, and whether people can still "sleep" in a divisive world.
Why it matters: For Stever and Melikova, casting non-professional trans and Ukrainian journalist leads and filming through active air-alarm territory turned a relationship drama into a portrait of queer love under bombardment. The 2005 Locarno alumna and her Ukrainian writer-partner now have a Competition title whose production realities — real drones, real alarms — shape its final form in ways no rehearsal could fake.
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