11/08/2026 - Isabelle Stever’s latest feature, written by Ukraine's Anna Melikova, is an ode to freedom and nonconformity in a world ruled by violence and injustice

Four years after collaborating on the startling and seductive feature Grand Jeté, German director Isabelle Stever and Ukrainian writer, screenwriter and film critic Anna Melikova reunite to present I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming, an aesthetically powerful, moving and courageous film that sets love against the brutality of war, in the International Competition of the Locarno Film Festival. With heart-rending poetry and stark realism, the film explores the slow encroachment of war into the everyday lives of those forced to face it first hand.

The love story between Olya (an intense Tania Myronyshena) and Oleh (a touching Markus Bright), a young, queer Ukrainian couple, is thrown into turmoil not only by one partner’s gender transition, but also by the Russian invasion. Struggling to save a relationship in which the partners are finding it increasingly hard to communicate, Olya and Oleh face a second, harrowing hurdle: the war. Forced to live in a suspended moment of violence, uncertainty and visceral intolerance towards everything deemed “different”, Olya and Oleh must contend with the absurdities of an armed conflict that eats away at them from within. In a wartime context, Oleh’s gender transition is pushed into the background, treated almost like a whim, rather than a necessity. To stand a chance of fleeing to Germany with his partner, he is forced to return to the country where he was born, a place marked by violent transphobia, and to reckon with his past.

I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming is a film about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but it tells it through the eyes of a queer couple fighting to keep their love alive. The brutality of war, which creeps into the narrative only via voices on the radio or harrowing allusions to atrocities perpetrated by the Russian militia (first and foremost the alleged rape of Olya’s sister, suggested with great tact through a shower scene), is constantly latent yet terribly real.

I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming examines the slow infiltration of violence into the minds of those forced to experience it first hand, like a tornado that flattens everything in its path. The early tenderness - the backlit intimacy of a bedroom, for instance - is contrasted, after the invasion, with the fear and anguish of two bodies entwined on a small mattress, in an embrace that seems to become a prison. In this sense, cinema becomes not only an aesthetic gesture, but also a political one, a weapon with which to restore substance to bodies that seem to be evaporating.

By juxtaposing two profound transformations, Oleh’s gender transition and the war, the film reflects on identity under extreme conditions. Rather than accept that trans identity be regarded by society as a mental illness - a requirement for being allowed to leave the country - Oleh opts to go to the front. At war not only with the invader but also with gender discrimination and transphobia, Oleh fights for his life. The look he gives the camera from the trenches, at the end of the film, is an act of rebellion and courage that defies even the war. I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming is a brave, powerful and necessary movie that restores dignity to those who fight to preserve their right to exist despite the violence of a world that seems to have forgotten them.

I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming was produced by Germany’s X Filme Creative Pool, in co-production with Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), and its international sales are handled by Outplay Films.

(Translated from Italian)