A German-Ukrainian relationship drama about a queer couple in Kyiv whose lives are upended by the Russian invasion has premiered in the main competition at the 2026 Locarno Film Festival, with a berth already secured in the Main Slate of this year's New York Film Festival.

Isabelle Stever directed I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming from a screenplay by her wife, Ukrainian writer Anna Melikova. The film centres on Olya and Oleh — played by Tania Myronyshena and Markus Bright, both non-professional actors bringing lived experience to their roles — a couple who met in Kyiv's queer scene when Oleh was living as a woman. His coming out as a trans man coincides with the outbreak of full-scale war, and the pair's efforts to flee are complicated by local prejudice on top of the violence surrounding them (Variety).

Tom Tykwer produced the film through his Berlin-based company X Filme Creative Pool. It is a German production, predominantly shot in Ukraine, with cinematography by Volodymyr Usyk, whose credits include the 2024 wartime documentary Songs of Slow Burning Earth (Variety; IndieWire).

Paris-based Outplay Films, an international sales outfit focused on LGBTQ cinema, picked up worldwide rights shortly before the Locarno premiere. For Stever, the film follows Grand Jeté (2022), which secured US distribution through the specialist label Altered Innocence (Variety).

The Locarno main competition is one of Europe's oldest festival juries, and a premiere there places a film in front of the programmers, critics and buyers who shape the autumn art-house calendar. A Main Slate selection at the New York Film Festival — the festival's flagship section — puts the title before North American audiences and acquisition executives in September.

What gives this film its particular weight is the collision of personal and historical timelines: a gender transition and a national catastrophe landing in the same weeks, in the same city. Usyk's background in wartime documentary, combined with two leads chosen for what they have lived rather than what they have trained for, gives the production a texture that festival reviewers have already singled out (Variety).