German director Isabelle Stever and Ukrainian screenwriter Anna Melikova discuss their powerful and moving latest film, I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming, presented in the International Competition at the Locarno Film Festival.

Cineuropa: How did the idea for I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming emerge?
Anna Melikova: The film started from a very personal story. The screenplay was inspired by the real-life experience of some friends of mine, a couple who were confronted with the gender transition of one of the partners. I immediately felt that there was something very particular and powerful in this conflict: how does the transition of one person affect the relationship between two people who have shared a life together? At the same time, I felt that the story could speak to many people, regardless of their sexual orientation. Those of us who have been in long-term relationships know that people change. Sometimes the changes concern appearance, or sometimes character or behaviour, and it is not always easy to accept them immediately. Then, the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, and suddenly, the story acquired another political, historical and social dimension. The two subjects - gender transition and war - came together almost naturally. I did not invent that connection; reality did. I collected different experiences, fragments of information and situations in order to make the screenplay more complex and to create a fictional world that would be able to contain several realities.

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The casting seems to have been particularly important. How did you find Markus Bright and Tania Myronyshena?
AM: For us, it was clear from the beginning that the trans character had to be played by a trans person. But we also knew that there were very few trans male actors in Kyiv or elsewhere in Ukraine, and even fewer who could work in Ukrainian. So, we began to consider non-professional actors as well. We thought it might take us a year to find the right person. Then, in 2023, I was in Kyiv as a jury member at an LGBTQ film festival. When I returned to Berlin, I asked some of the people I had met there whether they could help me. Within five minutes, I received a photograph of Markus. I showed it to Isabelle, and she immediately said, “I think we’ve found him.” It really happened that quickly. Of course, we did not yet know whether he could act or whether he would be right for the role. But there was something in his presence that immediately felt connected to the character. Then we had a similar experience with Tania.

Their relationship feels remarkably authentic. At times, it almost seems as though they might be a real couple. How did you work with them as non-professional actors?
IS: My method is based on what I call peaceful improvisations. I never work with the private lives of the actors; I work with the characters. But I give them space to bring something of their own personality into those characters. The interesting thing is that I do not necessarily know what belongs to the actor and what belongs to the character. With Markus and Tania, I knew that sending them a 120-page screenplay would probably have overwhelmed them. So instead, I gave them a detailed synopsis, and together, we improvised the backstory of the couple. That allowed the relationship between them to develop organically, without forcing them to reproduce something that had already been written.

The war is central to the film, but you never show it directly. Why was it important for you to avoid direct representations of violence?
AM: From the very beginning of the Russian invasion, I read a great deal about the representation of suffering in war. I became increasingly interested in the question of how we represent victims without turning their suffering into an image for consumption. When I was at the Cannes Film Festival in 2022, I watched a number of films about Ukraine. I remember leaving almost every screening because I could not enter those fictional worlds. At the same time, I had seen documentaries in which the real war and its victims were shown directly. That made me think that fiction does not necessarily need to reproduce the images we already see in the news. The news gives us the violence. We wanted to find another way of conveying it. We wanted the war to exist on a linguistic and emotional level, rather than simply through images of destruction. You know that it is there, you hear about it and you feel its consequences, but we do not need to show the violence itself.