NZIFF: Dreams (Sex Love) (2)

A teenage girl recounts her crush for her teacher through the pages of a memoir. The winner of the Golden Bear 2025 is a lucid and tender chronicle of the unforgettable experience of first love.

Originally intended as the second chapter in his trilogy and released in Norway as such, Dag Johan Haugerud’s Dreams ended up premiering internationally as the last. But it secured a fitting crown to the trilogy, by winning the Best Film at the 2025 Berlinale, thus inducting Haugerud among world class auteurs.

Dreams emanates from two of Haugerud’s passions: literature, as he first gained prominence in his homeland as writer, and the cinema of French master Éric Rohmer, distinguished by sentimental skirmishes brimful of finely written dialogues.

The film’s protagonist and narrator is Johanne, a 17-year-old student who falls for her new French teacher Johanna. Johanne manages to get close to her crush, who nonchalantly ignores how her student’s devotion is veering into affection. Yet, this chronicle of first love is told in a voice over reflecting the memoir that Johanne wrote on her experience – meaning that things may or may not have happened as she says. The memoir is also read by the girl’s mother and grandmother who muse on the girl’s literary talent and provide a layer of irony and melancholy to an unfathomably lucid and tender chronicle of the universal and unforgettable experience of first love. — Paolo Bertolin

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