This Berlinale Golden Bear winner is one of the best films of 2025, exploring how a teenage girl’s crush on her teacher sparks questions about literary catharsis and ownership of private feelings, as she mulls over publishing her sacred experiences of ‘love’.

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When Dreams (Sex Love) won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale earlier this year, I was slightly surprised.  I had much earlier caught Sex (2024), which was also presented at the Berlinale, and thought it wasn’t particularly great though it offers interesting, unfiltered insights into the views of two men and their insecurities about their sexuality. 

I’ve yet to watch Love (2024), which I am now dying to see, sparked by how much I really resonated with Dreams, which is one of the best pictures of 2025. 

It might be labelled as a coming-of-age drama, but the film is so much more than just a teen trying to figure herself out. 

Her name is Johanne, played with earnest sincerity by Ella Øverbye (doesn’t she look like a Norwegian Brie Larson?), who has such a strong crush on her teacher, Johanna, that she is convinced that it is not just love, but the most blissful form of love. 

Haven’t we experienced this at least once in our lives when we were younger—just simply being intoxicated by the presence of someone older in school or at work? 

“And it was then, when that word crossed my mind, that it dawned on me what this was.”

Well, whether it is requited is another matter altogether.  That is why Johanne has penned everything down, though not always literally, hoping to crystalise her emotions so that they won’t fade with time. 

But it is hard to keep things to oneself, isn’t it?  Why not publish it as a book, her novelist grandmother suggests, such is Johanne’s poetic way with words? 

And so, this is where Dag Johan Haugerud’s astute work about the nature of private feelings in the public domain becomes a question of ownership (of one’s sacred experiences) and catharsis (that these experiences are valid and ring true for others too). 

Haugerud captures Oslo, especially some scenes of upscale sections of the city, with the kind of sublimity that sucks you into Johanne’s point of view. 

Everything feels so warm, even when it is relentlessly snowing.  It is that quiet, buzzing feeling, that occasional skip in the step, that basking in someone else’s gaze, which Haugerud captures with understated grace.

Grade: A-

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