France's Outplay Films has acquired world sales rights to "I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming," Isabelle Stever's feature selected for the main competition at the Locarno Film Festival, according to Variety.

World sales rights mean Outplay will handle the film's licensing to distributors across international territories — the bridge between a finished film and its arrival in cinemas worldwide. The Marseille-based company's co-managing director and head of international sales and acquisitions, Diego Carazo-Migerel Fougères, will oversee that process.

"I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming" follows Olya and Oleh, a young queer Ukrainian couple whose relationship is tested when one partner's gender transition coincides with Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The film is written by Anna Melikova, with Stever directing. Stever and Melikova have described themselves as a Ukrainian-German filmmaking duo, per Variety.

The film is a Germany-Ukraine co-production, produced by Tom Tykwer and Uwe Schott at Berlin-based X Filme Creative Pool. Tykwer, the German director behind "Run Lola Run" and "Cloud Atlas," remains a central figure in European production through X Filme, the company he co-founded. His involvement as producer signals the weight of infrastructure behind the project.

Stever's film runs 100 minutes, is presented in colour on DCP — the digital cinema format standard for festival and theatrical exhibition — and has Ukrainian as its original language, according to the Locarno Film Festival programme. The festival lists the production year as 2026.

Locarno's Concorso Internazionale, or International Competition, is the Swiss festival's headline section, where titles compete for the Golden Leopard. Selection there places "I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming" among the films festival programmers consider the year's most accomplished. The festival typically runs in August.

For a sales company like Outplay, a Locarno competition berth is a practical asset: it gives buyers a credential and a premiere platform. The film's subject matter — a queer love story set against the war in Ukraine — gives it a clear hook for distributors looking for titles that speak to both personal and geopolitical stakes.

The deal positions Outplay to begin presenting the film to international buyers at upcoming industry markets, where territory-by-territory deals are negotiated in the months between a festival premiere and a theatrical rollout.