Isabelle Stever (born 1963) is a German film director and screenwriter. She is best known for directing the films Grand Jeté (2022) and I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming (2026).
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Early life
Stever was born in Munich in 1963 to a lawyer father and a homemaker mother. She was raised Catholic. She graduated with a degree in mathematics in 1994 and subsequently studied film directing at the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin (DFFB), receiving her directing diploma in 2002.
Career
Stever's graduation film, Portrait of a Married Couple (2002), won the First Steps Award for Best Feature Film. Her second feature film, Gisela (2005), was based on the book of the same name by Anke Stelling, whom Stever had known since the early 2000s, and Robby Dannenberg. Stever and Stelling jointly wrote the screenplay.
Stever later contributed the short film A Democratic Round Table at Scheduled Times to the anthology film Germany 09: 13 Short Films About the State of the Nation (2009), which premiered in competition at the 59th Berlin International Film Festival. The following year, she once again collaborated with Stelling on her film Blessed Events (2010), which premiered at the 35th Toronto International Film Festival. She subsequently directed The Weather Inside (2015), with German filmmaker Harun Farocki collaborating on the screenplay before his death.
