German director Isabelle Stever brings sensitivity and visual ingenuity to this story of a young queer couple whose life together is upended by the Russian invasion.
By Guy Lodge
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Film Critic
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'I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming' Courtesy of X Filme Creative Pool GmbH Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine has prompted a wealth of urgent nonfiction filmmaking documenting the harsh realities of life under siege, but comparatively little dramatic storytelling — a space that the new German-Ukrainian production “I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming” occupies with bold formal imagination and a commitment to illuminating lives neglected in wider views of the conflict. A timely collaboration between German director Isabelle Stever and her wife, Ukrainian screenwriter Anna Melikova, the film is an intimate, bracingly intersectional relationship drama centered on a queer Kyiv couple whose attempts to flee to safety are complicated by local prejudice: a reminder that selective discrimination can still endure within a collectively persecuted population.
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