Golden Bear. Drømmer, by Dag Johan Haugerud

by Luigi Vitali

Drømmer, the latest feature by Norwegian director Dag Johan Haugerud, has won the Golden Bear at the 75th Berlin International Film Festival. Third film in a trilogy (Sex, Love, Dreams), Drømmer is a brilliant, formally inventive work that reshapes cinematic grammar into something fresh, immersive, and incredibly smart.

At its core is Johanne, a 17-year-old girl overwhelmed by an intense desire for her female teacher. She records everything in her diary, and when her mother and grandmother discover it, their initial shock gives way to a debate about whether her beautifully written account should be published. As the film unfolds, the boundaries between dreams, desire, and reality blur, transforming into a bold meditation on longing, identity, and coming of age—but even more so, on the power of storytelling itself.

In this film, Dag Johan Haugerud challenges conventional cinematic techniques, turning form into a statement of intent. Rather than simply immersing us in Johanne’s emotional whirlwind, the film actively operates as a meta-commentary on how cinematic language shapes perspective. Voiceover dominates the first half, with nearly every scene narrated by Johanne as the visuals unfold, following each line of her diary entries. We are entirely inside her head, yet always conscious that this is the perspective of a teenager experiencing first love—one who inflates even the slightest moment into high drama.

The score, heavy with sweeping strings and grand classical compositions, reinforces this intensity as if her internal turmoil were channelling a modern Sorrows of Young Werther. Then comes a shift: when Johanne gathers the courage to go to her teacher’s house and confess her feelings, the story jumps forward a year to when she shares her diary with her family. Other perspectives now begin to shape the narrative. Grand classical music underscores her mother’s initial disoriented reaction until she suddenly says, “Can we turn this music off?” and reaches over to shut off the speaker in the kitchen. It’s a brilliant, self-aware gag that transforms extra-diegetic sound into diegetic, explicitly showcasing how the score is used as a narrative tool and how the entry of a new perspective is now changing the story’s tone.

The film operates through various perspectives to shape its narrative. There’s the story itself (which remains unseen), the way Johanne writes it, how her mother and grandmother interpret it, how her teacher analyses it, and how the director frames it through his own meta-narrative. At its core is Johanne’s dilemma: can something written purely for her diary hold meaning for others? Should they even have access to her personal world? Eventually, her mother and grandmother—an aspiring writer who never realized her ambitions—convince her that it could become a queer awakening bestseller. 

Within this dynamic, we see the female perspective of three generations, engaging in brilliantly witty discussions on feminism, the perception and reversal of abuse, opportunism, the commodification of emotions, the overestimation of one’s children, and the value of personal dreams.

As the film charts a journey of growth, its storytelling unfolds between two opposing scales, using contrast—perhaps—as a guiding force to calibrate a perspective on things. The everyday and the ordinary are elevated into something epic and universal, framing a question of positioning—where Johanne should stand in the space between, and where we, as viewers, should place ourselves.

In this sense, the recurring architectural shots of staircases, apartment steps, and an iron overpass in her neighborhood—wrapped in fog in the opening scene—likely take on symbolic weight, representing transition, elevation, and perhaps a rite of passage. Later, in a dream, Johanne’s grandmother envisions that same overpass as Jacob’s biblical ladder, stretching from earth to heaven, turning a familiar structure into a grand metaphor for dreams, desire, and the search for meaning. Through these constant shifts between the intimate and the monumental, the film finds its rhythm, never confined to a single register but constantly unfolding across multiple layers.

At its core, this is a coming-of-age film—one that, by weaving together these experiences, leads its protagonist toward greater self-awareness and the ability to put things into perspective. After all, growing up is precisely about that. So when the film ends with a new encounter, possibly romantic, instead of sweeping, solemn strings, a lighthearted pop song kicks in—as if, by this point, we as viewers have also learned to put things into perspective and see teenage crushes for what they truly are. This is a film that works seamlessly and is perfectly crafted.

Furthermore with its layered storytelling, Drømmer ultimately becomes a meditation on the act of narration itself—who gets to tell a story, how it is shaped by different voices, and what is lost or gained in translation. Haugerud masterfully plays with cinematic form to explore the tension between personal experience and collective interpretation, between private emotions and public narratives. In doing so, he crafts a film that is deeply intimate and profoundly self-aware, and challenges the very nature of storytelling.

As the third and final entry in Haugerud’s Sex, Love, Dreams trilogy, Drømmer completes an exploration of human relationships and identity across different stages of life. While Sex delves into desire, repression, and the social constructs that define relationships, and Love examines emotional attachments and the contradictions within them, Drømmer shifts the focus to self-perception, fantasy, and the narratives we construct about ourselves. Each film in the trilogy interrogates how external forces—societal expectations, personal history, and cultural myths—shape individual experiences, often revealing the fluid and unstable nature of identity itself.

More than just a film about first love or coming of age, Drømmer explores the construction of identity, perspective, and the shifting proportions of experience—how we shape and reshape our own histories through the stories we choose to tell. With this final chapter, Haugerud affirms his place as a filmmaker who not only understands human complexity but dares to redefine how cinema can narrate it.