The longer you paint yourself a little in thoughts and dreams, says 15-year-old Johanne (Ella Øgere), the more realistic it seems to you-completely regardless of how impossible it may be in the real world. Johanne is in love for the first time, in her teacher Johanna (Selome Emnetu), and after swarming (and -suffering) for a while, she decides to become active. She wants to learn to knit, although in contrast to her classmates, she is actually not interested in it at all. However, Johanna studied textile art and is happy to inform himself in teaching Johanne in it – even beyond the lesson, in her private apartment.
What exactly happens in this apartment then lets us “Oslo stories: dreams“Largely in the unclear, because both Johanne and director Dag Johan Hauberud, who concludes his trilogy about“ longing/dreams/love ”with this film, opt for another, namely artistic approach. Johanne writes a text about a love affair with her teacher, including revealing erotic details. She keeps this for herself, but over time the need gains the upper hand, your own feelings and the story drawn from it with someone. As a result, she entrusts the text of her grandmother Karin (Anne Marit Jacobsen) – on the one hand, because this is “more open” as Johannes mother Kristin (Ane Dahl Thorp), on the other hand perhaps also because Karin is a writer herself.
Johanne (Ella Øgere) has a terrible crush in her teacher Johanna (Selome Emnetu).
Because even if Johanne demands some rules in dealing with the manuscript and strict confidentiality, the moment when she hands over the personal text of another person to read, a decisive transformation is made. With his first reader, the private, diary -like text becomes literature, and this also changes his relationship with the world and the events that are described in it. This process is most clearly reflected in the reaction of Mother Kristin, who then passes on Karin the book, and with the idea that her granddaughter could possibly publish the manuscript as a book.
Kristin's first reaction is impulsive – is your daughter a victim of abuse? At this point, a return on an earlier work of the writer, filmmaker and librarian Dag Johan Haubereud also sounds, because of a forbidden affair between a teacher and a (in this case male) 15-year-old pupil he had already in his half-length , for a theater festival, staged monologue film “Det he meg du vil ha” – I am that you want. It was based on a true story and opposed the reporting in the gossip press a less lurid but openly subjective perspective. “Dreams” now works as a kind of complementary film on this earlier work, fans its perspective on what has only happened here, but much more complex.
What does it mean to create art
Because “dreams” is in the very first line about the artistic creative process, and what it means to revise its most personal in the work form. Also for the initially instinctively concerned Kristin, the view of her daughter's initially shocking text changes immediately when she is suggested by Karin to consider it as a literature. From the abuse confession, he becomes a feminist statement-a badly abrupt change of perspective, about which Karin is not wrongly funny. Other keywords from the literary company are also briefly torn down. Isn't it important for other young readers to describe a queer awakening? A attribution that Johanne himself, in turn, irritates – whether she is automatically a queer just because she is in love with her teacher, she replies, and you cannot avoid thinking of the heteroflexible chimney sweeps in “longing”, another of the three “Oslo-Stories” in Haubereud's trilogy.
However, these films are not only thematic, but also profound, namely in their human and relationship. As a red thread through Haubereud's work, the insistence is increasingly emerging that communication is possible and can go. Hauberud's protagonists are in a gesture of love, and what would suffice for a crushing problem film in other director's hands are more likely to work here as an impulse that starts an ongoing interpersonal negotiating.
Johanne discusses with her mother and grandmother, whether you should maybe even publish her manuscript as a book?
This does not mean that Haubereud's protagonist is flawless, on the contrary. Everyone here follows their own agenda, people lie to each other, disappoint each other, sometimes turn out to be completely different, more complex and contradictory than you wanted to see before. But in Hauberud's films this is no reason to break together, provided you are in love, friendship or at least benevolence. Rather, these films seem to be fulfilled by a very profound, through and through humanistic insight into the ambivalent being. And yet, or precisely because of this, fulfilled by a deep love for these people.
Conclusion: With “Oslo-Stories: Dreams” the Norwegian director Dag Johan Hauberud closes his (published in the German cinemas in a changed order) trilogy about “longing/dreams/love”-and finally establishes itself as one of the most exciting filmmakers of the current world cinemas. Based on the history of a possible love affair between a 15-year-old and her teacher, Haubereud unfolds a complex, always deliberately ambivalent reflection on life and art, reality and fiction, personal and dismistled. “Dreams” is a dazzling, touching film, which the feat succeeds, to always remain accessible and uncomplicated on the one hand – and yet to keep a certain secret to the end. This is big cinema!
We saw “Oslo-Stories: Dreams” at the Berlinale 2025, where it was shown as part of the official competition.