“Dreams (Sex Love)”: Three Words to Describe the Berlinale’s Biggest Winner

Disclaimer: this article contains information that might reveal some of the film’s plot points.

Some filmmakers’ careers change as soon as they win an important award, so what if an artist wins both the Golden Bear and the International Federation of Critics (FIPRESCI) awards on the same day? Norwegian director Dag Johan Haugerud will most likely remember Saturday, February 22, 2025, when he first won the Critics’ Award before being crowned in the evening with the highest award of the 75th Berlinale.

According to the pre-festival expectations, Dreams (Sex Love) or Drømmer was not among the films that benefited from great anticipation. The film does not include well-known stars, does not discuss current political issues, and its director, who is over 60, is known only to a few festival goers. He is a librarian and novelist who made three feature films throughout his career, before launching a trilogy of films that he quickly completed last year, with the first part, Sex, being shown in the Panorama section of the Berlin Film Festival 2024, then the second part, Love (Kjærlighet) participating in the Venice Film Festival competition, before the third part reaches the Berlin competition.

How can such a film unite opinion? And be chosen by two juries as the best in a competition of 19 feature films, many of which are outstanding? Perhaps the answer lies in three words: creativity, novelistic appeal, and a triumph of talent.

Creativity: From Reading and Back

Dreams begins with a girl writing about the act of reading. A Norwegian teenager living with her mother whose life turns upside down when she decides in a moment of boredom to read a classic novel. The pleasure of reading leads her to start keeping her own diary, and everything changes when a young teacher with a name similar to hers arrives at her school. Johanne (Ella Øverbye) finds herself falling in love with her teacher Johanna (Selome Emnetu) and records the events of this attraction in a diary that she did not intend to show to anyone, but things do not go as she planned.

From the beginning, the centrality of both reading and writing is clear. The story begins with reading that prompts writing, then moves on when the poet grandmother Karin (Anne Marit Jacobsen) reads the text and expresses her admiration for it. This admiration creates the paradox around which the drama revolves: the teenage girl wrote a wonderful text that can even be considered a novel, its beauty makes it practically impossible to distinguish between reality and fantasy in it. On the one hand, the event must be disturbing to the grandmother and mother Kristin (Ane Dahl Torp), especially what Johanne wrote about the teacher’s interaction with her. On the other hand, they know—especially the grandmother—that what is written may contain as much literary teenage imagination as the facts.

Creativity, then, represents the first forming element of Dreams. Creativity is what made a girl who was not used to reading addicted to writing and to fictionalise her life, and creativity is what made her diary trigger a discussion larger than a teenage confession of falling in love. It makes the grandmother and mother look at the situation from a different perspective, trying to understand what happened, determine the level of truth in it, and find a proper way to interact with Johanne and her text, which have become separate; she is a teenager whose feelings must be dealt with carefully, while it is a powerful text that can be published.

Novelistic Appeal: More than a Screen Character

Dreams is a film that is exclusively feminine, with hardly any men appearing until the last minutes. The drama is based primarily on the interaction between three females representing three generations within the family, to whom the teacher is added when the mother meets her to hear her point of view of the story. What is amazing about the script written by director Dag Johan Haugerud himself is not only his ability to present the different points of view of four women, but also his ability to capture the fluctuations that occur within the psyche of each of them.

It is logical for the film to show the ambiguity that drives Johanne’s feelings due to her experiencing love for the first time, mixed with obsession with her charming young teacher. But the director’s narrative skills appear more in his depiction of the characters of the grandmother and the teacher, manifesting each of these characters differently and according to the dramatic moment.

Karin is a creative poet and an open-minded grandmother who understands her granddaughter and even envies her ability to enjoy those raw feelings. She knows the value of the text written by Johanne and defends it. But because she is ultimately an artist who carries the typical jealousy of creative people, she cannot prevent herself from feeling awkward when she finds her publisher admiring someone else’s text and wanting to publish it, so she almost hides the information from Johanne. This simple, light-hearted detail reveals the value of the director’s novelistic background, which enables him to express the contradictions that human souls carry, especially creative ones.

This understanding of characters’ complexity makes us feel they are rooted in reality. They are not just elements that play their role within the narrative, but rather human beings of flesh and blood who have a presence in life, proven by the most prominent characteristic within the soul of any rational human being: contradiction.

A Triumph of Talent, and of the Love Narrative

If we move to the teacher Johanna, we will find that the film plays two dramatic games with her. The first is the game of perspectives, as we follow her during the first and second acts through eyes confused by Johanne’s love and creativity. We see her as an attractive woman who is indulgent with the student’s attraction to her, with all that indulgence entails in terms of moral questions for an adult in a position of authority. This continues until we see Johanna’s perspective in the third act, only to know that a big part of Johanne’s text was a result of her romantic interpretations of ordinary events.

But even this perspective is never confirmed by Haugerud, relying on the second dramatic game, which is the balance of power. Johanna begins her meeting with Kristin while being confused, afraid that the family will report her based on the written text, with what this means for her job and reputation, and thus her story seems to be a mixture of denial and apology, denying doing anything that violates the rules and apologizing for any misunderstanding the girl received about her.

But once the teacher realizes that Johanne’s family does not plan to take legal action, her position in the same meeting is shifted. Presenting a third version of the story, in which the student appears as an intrusive teenager trying to impose herself on the teacher’s life. In the same scene, we see two versions of the relationship, both different from the Johanne’s one.

Which of the three versions is correct? We will never know, although we tend to trust the student. Not only because it is the story we have been following since the beginning of the film and identifying with, but mainly because we gradually realize that when the stories are multiple and the concept of truth is fragmented, the version narrated from the ground of love will always remain truer than the ones driven by fear or pride, even if most of the love narrative it is the wild imagination of a talented teenage writer.

Ahmed Shawky
Edited by Savina Petkova
©FIPRESCI 2025