19/02/2025 - BERLINALE 2025: Norwegian director Dag Johan Haugerud concludes his triptych, ending on a fitting note of optimism

Ella Øverbye and Selome Emnetu in Dreams (Sex Love)

It’s been only a year since his film Sex [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Dag Johan Haugerud
film profile] (Berlinale Panorama 2024) inaugurated a trilogy of movies about human relationships, and Norwegian director Dag Johan Haugerud has already concluded it with Dreams (Sex Love) [+see also:
trailer
interview: Dag Johan Haugerud
film profile], in the Berlinale’s Official Competition. Sex and its follow-up, Love [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Dag Johan Haugerud
film profile] (Venice 2024), made a beautiful double bill, telling two very different stories set in various parts of Oslo and its surroundings, so Dreams has a significantly harder mission to fulfil as a culmination. However, what Haugerud demonstrates with this particular triptych is that hierarchies have no place in love (or sex or dreams).

The whole of Dreams is orchestrated around teenager Johanne’s (Ella Øverbye) experience of first love. Falling in love is already impossible to navigate, but in her case, it’s even harder: the object of her affection is none other than her French teacher, Johanna (Selome Emnetu). Haugerud takes a simple plot idea with an in-built conflict and expands a world within the film world, thanks to his usual curiosity and genuine appreciation for what makes people tick, no matter their age, gender or sexuality. To mirror this disposition, Johanne’s tender voiceover narrates the film and its spiral structure: the origin of love, the experience of love growing, and the decision to write all of this down. In a marvellously fluid way, the movie weaves together her private experiences and autofiction, as well as thoughtful meta-conversations about the purpose of personal writing.

Johanne says she wrote down what happened in order to preserve it; in her attempt to do so, one can sense a yearning of Romantic calibre. If you’re a writer, you’d also recognise that irrational desire to prolong the life of your experience, and the difficulties that ensue when sharing the result with others. Dreams encompasses larger discussions about autofiction within the family, consisting of Johanne’s mother, Kristin (Ane Dahl Torp, who plays a very different mother role in another Berlinale title, The Ugly Stepsister [+see also:
film review
film profile]), and her grandmother, Karin (Anne Marit Jacobsen) – the latter being a poet herself. Even if there is a lot of talking around those topics, the most gripping moments of Dreams are to be found in the repetitions, revisiting and reconfigurations of all of its female characters. Instead of simply mirroring one another, they form an intricate web of dualities and contradictions, and in turn, they influence each other – in this, the film is as sincere as cinema can get.

The films that Dag Johan Haugerud makes are love letters to Oslo, celebrating human connection: real or imagined, these encounters make us who we are and reverberate long after their original vessel has disappeared. Dreams, much like its predecessors Sex and Love, is a paean to the fleeting moments that bring profound change without us realising it just yet.

Dreams (Sex Love) was produced by Norway’s Motlys and by Viaplay Group, in co-production with the Oslo Filmfond. Berlin-based company m-appeal handles the film’s world sales.

Photogallery 20/02/2025: Berlinale 2025 - Dreams (Sex Love)

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Ane Dahl Torp, Selome Emnetu, Ella Øverbye, Anne Marit Jacobsen, Dag Johan Haugerud
© 2024 Dario Caruso for Cineuropa - dario-caruso.fr, @studio.photo.dar, Dario Caruso