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A fact often gone unacknowledged is that, as we age, our desires unwittingly change. When it does, the terms we used to define ourselves and those around us must undergo a process of deconstruction, after which one can fashion a new vocabulary. At the start of Norwegian novelist-turned-filmmaker Dag Johan Haugerud’s Sex, the first installment in his Oslo Trilogy––followed by Love and concluding with Dreams, which won the Golden Bear at the 2025 Berlin Film Festival––we encounter two middle-aged chimney sweeps in the middle of confessing their respective crises of identity, which has left them bewildered and distraught.

The first, Avdelingsleder (Thorbjørn Harr), is concerned with a dream where David Bowie appears and looks at him like he’s a woman, instilling in him a mollifying feeling that remains in waking life. The other, Feier (Jan Gunnar Røise), unpacks a recent, unexpected, rather pleasant sexual encounter with a...

Like Ingmar Bergman, Éric Rohmer, and Hong Sang-soo before him, Dag Johan Haugerud believes in the niceties of conversation. Sex, one third of the writer-director’s Oslo Stories trilogy, largely consists of dialogue-driven scenes across which his characters reveal their desires and emotions. If the style of these long, mostly static scenes isn’t exactly novel, it nevertheless indicates how Haugerud aligns his work within a certain arthouse tradition, which pays modest dividends throughout the film’s two-hour runtime.

Early on, an unnamed, middle-aged man (Jan Gunnar Røise) sits off screen, listening as his boss (Thorbjørn Harr), also unnamed and middle-aged, discusses a dream in which he encounters David Bowie, who mistakes him for a woman. “He was taking charge from there. And that felt so good,” the man says. But, he adds, the dream didn’t end in sex. Then, as the camera pulls back and pans right, the...

Don’t get too hot and bothered over the title of the new Norwegian film Sex. The act itself in this first entry in a new trilogy from writer-director Dag Johan Haugerud is really only just talked about in this intriguing movie mostly dependent on leaning into its main characters’ words and descriptions, not a whole lot of visual information. Winner of the Europa Cinemas Label as Best European Film in the Panorama section of the current Berlin Film Festival, where it had its world premiere this week, Haugerud has announced this as this first of three films — Sex, Dreams, and then Love — featuring the same cast and dealing overall with themes of desire, identity and freedom, not to mention sexuality and the place of gender in our lives and society. This first stand-alone film also leans heavily into masculinity in ways it is not normally discussed by guys, but...

“Beware of Children” director Dag Johan Haugerud is ready to talk about “Sex” as the first part of his anticipated “Sex Dreams Love” trilogy is heading to Berlinale’s Panorama in February.

“Making a film called ‘Sex’ calls for all sorts of jokes and misunderstandings during production, everything from being summoned to a ‘sex-meeting’ to emails being censored because someone had written ‘sex-props’ in the subject field,” he tells Variety ahead of the trailer premiere.

“As for the screenplay, there aren’t that many jokes about sex in it. Some awkward humor, yes. But the main point has been about trying to show the short span between ecstatic pleasure and shame. There are – and might always be – two sides of the same coin when it comes to sex, which also means that the uncomfortable and the funny sit quite tight.”

Norwegian drama will focus on two men in heterosexual marriages...

Itonje Søimer Guttormsen’s feature debut traces the story of a troubled young woman on the outside of outsider art

Before it dissolves out into a watery sort of nothingness, this feature debut from Norwegian director Itonje Søimer Guttormsen is an intriguing and subversive docu-type drama about the nature of creativity and how modern-day equivalents of the avant gardist Antonin Artaud might expect to be treated. Birgitte Larsen plays Gry-Jeanette Dahl, who goes by the name “Gritt”. She is a troubled, intense young woman, trying to break into experimental theatre and radical performance artforms, and basically in the unhappy position of being on the outside of outsider art.

As the film begins, Gritt has managed to fluke her way to New York, part of a grant-funded Norwegian theatre company; she is employed as the emotional support person for Marte (Marte Wexelsen Goksøyr), a writer-performer with Down’s. Gritt affects a...

Itonje Søimer Guttormsen's Gritt is showing exclusively on Mubi in many countries starting December 22, 2021 in the series Debuts.The making of Gritt, or how to put stones in your shoes to prevent you from getting where you think you should be going, and instead bump into all that other stuff you can put into the pot, to brew some new reality.In 2009 I ran into Birgitte Larsen (a.k.a. Gritt) sitting on a blanket in a park in Oslo. She had acted in a film school exercise I did two years earlier, but although I was struck by her intense and unusual presence even then, we hadn’t stayed in touch. Nevertheless, we immediately felt that this was a crucial encounter. I was in a crisis with the film medium in terms of format and production method and was aching to experiment. Also, I had recently encountered the...

After a stellar year picking up awards at Berlin, South by Southwest, Edinburgh and Melbourne, “Ninjababy” continued its prize-winning streak at Norway’s top plaudits for national movies, the Amanda Awards. Their prize ceremony kicked off the Norwegian International Film Festival in Haugesund on Saturday night.

The second feature from TV-film director Yngvild Sve Flikke (“Women in Oversized Men’s Shirts”), the ebullient comedy-drama film won out in four major categories: director, actress (Kristine Kujath Thorp), supporting actor (Nader Khademi) and screenplay.

Flikke’s sophomore feature is based on the graphic novel by Sætre, The Art of Falling,” which itself won numerous youth literature awards in 2012 for the Norwegian illustrator. The film follows aspiring artist Rakel, 23, who unexpectedly discovers she is six months pregnant and that the father is not her boyfriend, The story then pursues a series of comedic, yet grounded, twists and turns.

“I’m a restless person,...

The Key Buyers Event: Digital, a film and TV market held in Russia, will return for a third edition in 2021. The event showcases new audiovisual content from the country and highlights emerging talent. This year’s focus will be international co-production, rather than the typical focus on distribution. The event is organized by promotional body Roskino and is supported by the Department of Entrepreneurship and Innovative Development of the City of Moscow and the Agency for Creative Industries. The 2020 edition gathered more than 1,400 participants and 600 international distributors from 70 countries, according to Roskino. A new strand will also be inaugurated this year that will highlight Russian projects for global film festival programmers. “Russian content has enjoyed increasing levels of success within the global market over the last three years. Russian films have increasingly become popular – the latest example is Sputnik, a sci-fi horror that has been acquired for an English-language remake in Hollywood.

Filmmakers in discussion included Ainhoa Rodríguez, Taiki Sakpisit, Marta Popivoda and Itonje Søimer Guttormsen.

Four directors with features selected for the Tiger competition at this week’s International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) discussed the importance of women to their stories and using historical trauma to spotlight contemporary issues at the first of the festival’s live online daily press conferences.

Directors Ainhoa Rodríguez, Taiki Sakpisit, Marta Popivoda and Itonje Søimer Guttormsen spoke via video call with festival director Vanja Kaludjercic.

Destello Bravío, the debut feature from Spain’s Rodríguez, centres on a group of women – played by non-professional actors – in...

Filmmakers in discussion included Ainhoa Rodríguez, Taiki Sakpisit, Marta Popivoda and Itonje Søimer Guttormsen.

Four filmmakers with films selected for the Tiger competition at this week’s International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) discussed the importance of women to their stories and using historical trauma to spotlight contemporary issues at the first of the festival’s live online daily press conferences.

Directors Ainhoa Rodríguez, Taiki Sakpisit, Marta Popivoda and Itonje Søimer Guttormsen spoke via video call with festival director Vanja Kaludjercic.

Destello Bravío, the debut feature from Spain’s Rodríguez, centres on a group of women – played by non-professional actors – in...

The most fascinating element of Itonje Søimer Guttormsen’s strong feature debut “Gritt” is the way the director presents a problematic character who polarizes viewers. For some, Gritt (Birgitte Larsen) will be seen as a passionately creative woman whose inability to break into the alternative performance community leads her to make some very bad choices — when her free-thinking approach is stifled, she’s denied an outlet and does some foolish things. Others however will have a different take: Gritt is a troubled woman who appropriates half-ideas she’s unable to fully process, and it’s her self-centered fixation on being an outsider that leads to a serious betrayal of those around her.

, and the way the film leaves open the possibility of interpretation makes it an ideal festival entry. Søimer Guttormsen and Larsen first began exploring this character in the 2016 short “Retrett,” which is likely why Gritt feels so fully-formed,...

Variety has been given exclusive access to the trailer for Itonje Søimer Guttormsen’s feature debut “Gritt,” which has its world premiere at the Rotterdam Film Festival on Feb. 2, and then goes straight to Göteborg, where it plays in the Dragon competition. International sales are being handled by Mer Film, its production company. It is the first Norwegian film ever to play in competition at Rotterdam, and the first Norwegian film to play there in any section for 17 years.

The film follows Gry-Jeanette – played by Birgitte Larsen – who left Norway with the dream of becoming an actress, 17 years ago. Now, having failed to find either fame in Hollywood or notoriety in Berlin, she’s back, and calling herself Gritt. While her old friends from college have established successful careers on the Oslo theater circuit, Gritt is passionate about staging a “manifestation”: a radical collective ritual. But nobody seems to care.