German-Ukrainian Drama Explores Queer Life Amid Wartime Displacement

A new German-Ukrainian drama offers a fresh perspective on the toll on people of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, centering on a same-sex couple whose attempts to escape the conflict are undermined by prejudice within their own persecuted community. Directed by German director Isabelle Stever and penned by her Ukrainian spouse Anna Melikova, “I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming” debuted in the main competition at the Locarno Film Festival, presenting an intimate relationship drama that examines how selective discrimination endures even amid collective suffering. The film marks a rare example of narrative filmmaking tackling the 2022 invasion, moving beyond the documentary accounts that have dominated cinema’s response to the war to shed light on lives and experiences often passed over in wider accounts of conflict.

A Contemporary Account on Ukraine’s Overlooked Tales

Whilst the Russian invasion of Ukraine has generated considerable documentary output documenting the stark realities of life in conflict zones, dramatic narratives examining the conflict remain comparatively scarce. “I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming” tackles this gap with significant creative ambition, offering what amounts to a uncommon narrative examination of the way conflict transforms intimate lives. The film’s decision to focus on a same-sex couple managing forced relocation reveals dimensions of the conflict that wider narratives often overlook—the intersection of conflict-related oppression with pre-existing social prejudices that can divide populations even as they face outside dangers. This intersectional approach grants the narrative a unique compelling force and emotional resonance.

Director Stever’s partnership with screenwriter Melikova brings a notably individual dimension to the storytelling, drawing on personal history to craft an authentically rendered portrait of queer Ukrainian life during wartime. The film’s commitment to depicting transgender marriage candidly distinguishes it even within queer filmmaking, whilst its wartime context adds additional depth to relationship dynamics. By refusing to subsume queer narratives within broader war narratives, “I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming” establishes room for stories that demand individual attention and recognition. The work demonstrates how personal stories can simultaneously shed light on individual challenges and wider social truths about endurance through upheaval.

• Film focuses on queer Kyiv couple managing displacement amid local prejudice
• Investigates how collective persecution exists alongside targeted prejudice
• Rare narrative approach to the 2022 invasion of Ukraine
• Presents same-sex marriage with forthright, intersectional perspective

The Meeting Point of Love, Sense of Self and Crisis of the Nation

At its heart, “I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming” explores how personal relationships fracture under the strain of systemic displacement. The film’s main couple confronts not merely the outward danger of attack, but the internal complications stemming from a society that simultaneously demands their solidarity whilst withholding acceptance. This contradiction—wherein a people facing shared danger may still maintain discrimination against its most vulnerable members—forms the emotional heart of Stever’s work. By positioning a transgender relationship at the story’s heart, the film refuses the erasure that typically follows wartime storytelling, instead asserting that queer lives and loves demand recognition even, or perhaps especially, amid national crisis.

The intimacy recorded between the couple functions as both refuge and vulnerability. Their efforts to escape safety become complicated not solely by military circumstances, but by the discrimination they face within their own uprooted society. This accumulation of tensions—personal, social, and geopolitical—creates a distinctly multifaceted portrait of wartime experience. Stever’s directorial method underscores the intimate scenes that preserve connections under duress, granting comparable significance to the everyday prejudices and structural constraints that complicate escape as to the larger forces transforming Ukraine. The film thereby argues that liberation, whether from war or discrimination, requires addressing all dimensions of human vulnerability.

Navigating Systemic Conflicts

The narrative examines how bureaucratic systems and social attitudes can become obstacles as formidable as military ones. As the couple attempts to reach to safety, they face institutional resistance rooted in prejudice—a cruel irony when survival itself depends upon community support and official assistance. These moments expose how wartime displacement exposes existing fractures within societies, converting latent discrimination into active barriers. Stever documents these encounters with unflinching clarity, demonstrating that securing refuge requires traversing not merely checkpoints and borders, but deeply entrenched social hostilities that persist even as collective danger mounts.

The film’s handling of these institutional contradictions avoids melodrama, instead showing them as the ordinary, routine obstacles that build toward fundamental dangers. Officials who might empathise on a personal level prove bound by rules and cultural biases. Community members who face the couple’s forced removal nonetheless refuse solidarity based on sexual preference or gender expression. These contradictions highlight a crucial fact: that widespread oppression does not automatically dismantle embedded power structures of privilege and marginalisation. By depicting these dynamics, “I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming” insists that any full reckoning of wartime suffering must address how some populations remain subject to compounded danger.

Visual Narrative and Understated Acting

Director Isabelle Stever adopts a calibrated style that prioritises compositional exactness over emotional catharsis, a directorial decision that differentiates “I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming” from traditionally structured war narratives. Working alongside cinematographer Volodymyr Usyk—whose earlier projects include the highly regarded 2024 documentary “Songs of Slow Burning Earth”—Stever establishes a visual grammar that avoids emotional excess whilst maintaining significant affective power. The film’s controlled visual approach and carefully composed frames create deliberate distance between observer and depicted action, yet this formal coolness unexpectedly heightens the tender exchanges shared between the central couple. Rather than overwhelming audiences with explicit scenes of war, Stever relies on restraint and inference, allowing quiet exchanges and glances to convey the significance of displacement and fear.

The acting themselves reflect this aesthetic restraint, with actors avoiding theatricality in favour of naturalistic understatement that proves far more affecting. This approach requires substantial talent from the cast, who must convey profound emotional turbulence through restrained physicality and muted vocal performance. The result is a portrait of queer love that feels genuinely inhabited rather than theatrically performed, anchoring the film’s political elements in authentic human intimacy. By refusing melodrama, Stever enables audiences to impose their own affective reactions onto the carefully controlled canvas she presents, creating space for contemplation rather than prescribing emotional reactions.

• Deliberately framed cinematography highlights private moments over outward turmoil
• Restrained performances convey emotional openness through subtle gesture and expression
• Visual rigour supports emotional authenticity rather than aesthetic detachment

The Skill Behind Personal Space

Stever’s pictorial approach deliberately sustains what might be termed “intimate distance”—a formal strategy that reflects the mental states of displacement and disconnection. The camera regularly captures the couple from deliberate angles, avoiding both intrusion and detachment, positioning viewers as respectful witnesses rather than voyeurs. This visual separation between camera and subjects reflects broader themes about visibility and vulnerability; the couple’s queerness makes them at once highly visible as objects of discrimination and erased by prevailing accounts of wartime suffering. Through careful framing and visual decisions, Stever expresses this tension visually, suggesting how marginalised communities occupy spaces where recognition itself becomes complex and contested.

The film’s color scheme and illumination approach further reinforce this visual approach, utilising muted tones and naturalistic illumination that avoid the stark contrasts often associated with conflict cinema. Interior spaces feel lived-in and authentic rather than artificially created, whilst exterior scenes depict the everyday nature of urban displacement rather than dramatic devastation. This restrained visual approach proves especially effective in portraying everyday instances—communal dining, hushed exchanges, tender physical contact—that constitute the genuine substance of close relationships. By granting such moments visual weight comparable to moments of peril or resistance to institutions, Stever argues that love itself represents a form of resistance, deserving of cinematic attention and careful attention to form.

Festival Recognition and Distribution Prospects

Following its premiere in the primary competition category at the renowned Locarno Film Festival, “I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming” has already attracted considerable industry attention and distribution interest. The film’s blend of topical relevance, emotional accessibility, and formal sophistication has marked it as a probable contender for broader international acclaim. The involvement of producer Tom Tykwer, the celebrated German filmmaker behind “Run Lola Run,” adds considerable prestige to the project and signals confidence in its commercial and artistic potential. Such industry support, paired with the film’s festival credentials, suggests favourable prospects for reaching audiences beyond the festival circuit.

Paris-founded specialist distributor Outplay Films, which concentrates solely on LGBTQ-themed cinema, acquired international sales rights just prior to the Locarno premiere, underscoring the film’s appeal to queer audiences and programmers worldwide. The distributor’s involvement indicates industry recognition that the work offers something authentically original—a candid, nuanced portrayal of transgender marriage that would command attention even absent the wartime context. Given Stever’s previous film “Grand Jeté” successfully achieved U.S. distribution through Altered Innocence despite its provocative subject matter, there is every reason to anticipate that “I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming,” with its more emotionally immediate approach and pressing contemporary relevance, will achieve comparable or enhanced exposure across territories.

The film’s potential within independent cinema circuits seem quite robust, in light of its formal sophistication and narrative richness. However, its capacity to move audiences and examination of core relationship patterns—complicated by exceptional situations—suggest potential crossover appeal outside of queer-specific spaces. Programming professionals and reviewers seeking current cinema that substantively addresses the Ukrainian crisis whilst centering marginalised perspectives will tend to advocate for the work with strong endorsement.