Ukraine-Set Drama About a Trans Man Barred From Fleeing War, ‘I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming,’ Wins Tokyo’s Ethical Film Award

German director and screenwriter Isabelle Stever’s “I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming” has won the Tokyo International Film Festival’s Ethical Film Award.

The award, set up in 2023 with sponsor Sumitomo Corporation, highlights films that shed light on issues such as the environment, poverty and discrimination. A jury picks the winner from three nominees drawn from the festival lineup.

Actor Isomura Hayato, a two-time Japan Academy Film Prize winner who runs the Shizuoka Film Festival in his hometown, headed this year’s jury. He was joined by three members of the festival’s student PR team. The other nominees were Brazil’s “Amadeo and the Hypothetical New World,” directed by Brenda Lígia and Edu Felistoque, and Australia’s “Time and Tide,” directed by Vee Shi.

Stever’s film, a Germany-Ukraine co-production, opens in Kyiv at the end of 2021, months before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Oleh, a trans man, tries to leave the country to escape the coming war but is barred because of the gender listed on his documents. He stays behind with his partner, Olya, and the couple struggle to hold on to their relationship and their sense of self as the bombing draws closer.

Stever’s earlier films have had their premieres at the Berlinale and at festivals in Toronto, Locarno and Busan. She worked on her two most recent features with her wife, the Ukrainian novelist and screenwriter Anna Melikova.

Isomura said the jury rated the film highly for taking on gender against the backdrop of the current war between Russia and Ukraine. The film follows a couple swept up in that war whose identity, sense of purpose and values are shaken and denied, he said, and asks how people can go on living under those conditions. He said the jurors chose it in the hope that many people would see it and take some time to reflect.

Stever, who could not travel to Tokyo, accepted the award in a video message recorded during a break from teaching at a film school. “Queer is not only referring to LGBTQ+. It is, as well, referring to something that is not normalized,” she said. “And we all know if everything would be normalized, we would stop breathing.”

She linked that idea to autocratic regimes, where people must obey set standards and have no other options, and to Ukrainians fighting “so people can still breathe in this country.”

The festival will send Stever a certificate and a cash prize of JPY200,000 ($1,270) at a later date.