Ane Dahl Torp, left, and Overbye in Dreams, which won the Golden Bear in Berlin this February.
Dag Johan Haugerud’s Oslo Trilogy movies follow city residents as they navigate contemporary intimacy. What’s provocative is their empathy, the director says.
Early in Dreams, a new film by Norwegian director Dag Johan Haugerud, a mother is confronted with a shocking revelation: her 17-year-old daughter, Johanne, has been having an affair with her female teacher. The girl discloses the experience by writing it in a book and giving it to her family to read – an act that in most movies would be followed by panicked calls to the school or the police.
But in Haugerud’s film – part of a three-part project called Love-Sex-Dreams: The Oslo Trilogy – the reactions are almost comically muted. “I’m not sure if I should be angry or not,” the mother tells the girl’s grandmother. When the mother suggests the girl might be protecting the teacher by obscuring incriminating details, the grandmother admonishes her: “You’ve listened to too many podcasts.”
This open-minded approach to sexual taboos is a hallmark of Haugerud’s trilogy, and Dreams has been a breakthrough for the 60-year-old director. It won the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival.
In a recent interview in Oslo, Norway, Haugerud described the project – which follows a sprawling cast of Oslo residents, young and old, straight and gay – as a provocative exercise in empathy. “It could be regarded as utopian,” he said, “but it depends on how you see it.”
Aside from their unconventional treatment of sex, the films also stand out for their conspicuous lack of tension. “To me, conflicts are not so entertaining to see in a movie,” Haugerud said, adding that watching two characters talk their way through a problem was more interesting than seeing a fight in which one person storms out of a room. “I’ve seen that so many times,” he said.
The release order for the trilogy, which was made to be viewed in any sequence, has varied internationally. Love, which screened at the Venice Film Festival in 2024, centres on a female doctor who begins cruising men for sex on a local ferry. In Sex, which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival that same year, an ostensibly heterosexual chimney sweep negotiates the fallout after he spontaneously hooks up with a male customer.
Despite the title, Sex depicts no physical intimacy and instead centres on a series of drily comic conversations about relationships and identity. When the chimney sweep tells a straight colleague over lunch about his experience, he calmly explains that he isn’t gay, adding that the encounter was “nice, in a way, but I don’t plan on doing it again”. His colleague’s main concern is how the man’s wife will take the news.
Dreams – which, in keeping with its teenage subject, adopts a gauzier, more emotionally heightened tone than the rest of the trilogy – has been especially singled out by international critics. In a speech awarding Dreams the Golden Bear in Berlin this February, the festival’s jury president, American director Todd Haynes, celebrated the film’s “keen intelligence and sudden astonishing moments of revelation”.
Haugerud said he saw his trilogy as a counterpoint to the rise of a social discourse centred on conflict and division. “Empathy is not a word that is seen as very important right now, especially in the United States,” he said, but “I think these values are very much what people are thinking about right now”.
He emphasised, however, that his films were inextricably linked to their Oslo setting.
Elise Dybvig, a culture reporter and a critic at Morgenbladet, a respected newspaper in Norway, argued that Haugerud’s trilogy was part of a recent wave of directors from the country with a new, distinctively Norwegian sensibility, including Joachim Trier (The Worst Person in the World), Kristoffer Borgli (Sick of Myself) and Lilja Ingolfsdottir (Loveable).
Unlike previous generations of Norwegian directors, she said, they eschewed mainstream American influences and instead emulated political films made in Norway during the 1970s and 1980s.
She said that Haugerud’s films, in particular, grapple with the tension between Norway’s historically expansive welfare state – with generous social benefits and high levels of gender parity – and a money-focused culture that has emerged with the country’s more recent, exorbitant oil wealth.
That tension is on display in the Oslo of Love-Sex-Dreams. In recent years, authorities have spent hundreds of millions of dollars redeveloping the city’s waterfront into a tourist-friendly district known as “Fjord City,” dotted with expensive museums and sleek high-rises. Some residents have argued that with this glossy transformation, the city has lost some of its egalitarian, progressive ethos.
The characters in Love-Sex-Dreams were an idealised embodiment of those humble Norwegian ideals, Dybvig argued. “The films are a radical project that uses kindness to challenge society’s norms,” she said, comparing them to the work of British film-maker Ken Loach.
Haugerud, who is gay, said that one of his goals in the trilogy had been to describe what might happen if people of all sexualities adopted a gay perspective on intimacy. In Love, for instance, a woman finds herself enthralled after discovering the joys of cruising for sex in public. “I want the character to see themselves as being able to experience much more than they thought they could,” he said.
Born to a car mechanic and a restaurant worker in a village one hour south of Oslo, Haugerud said he “grew up in a social democracy that worked, I think, really well”. He eventually moved to Stockholm to study and wrote fiction while working as a museum attendant.
After returning to Norway and getting a job as a librarian, he made his first short film, which he screened among friends. Then, a production company got in touch about making more. His second feature, Beware of the Children, about a girl who causes the death of a classmate, premiered at the 2019 Venice Film Festival.
He recalled that after that film’s success, an official at the Norwegian film funding authority urged him to think “bigger” about his next project. “So I decided we should give her something very big,” he said, and proposed the Oslo Trilogy. The three films were made with only short breaks separating each shoot – a schedule, he said, that “wasn’t the best experience”.
Ella Overbye, the 20-year-old actor who plays Johanne in Dreams, said that Haugerud’s characters were shaped by his own sensitivity. When she first read the script, she said, she was surprised by his ability to channel the emotions of an infatuated teenager. “I was thinking, ‘Oh, how does this grown man know how it is to be a 17-year-old girl?’” she said.
The answer, she added: “He’s very empathetic.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Thomas Rogers
Photographs by: David B. Torch
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