The unexpected 2025 Golden Bear winner delivers a thought-provoking meditation on consent, power, and perception through a distinctly female-centered narrative.
The winner of the 2025 Golden Bear has been announced as Drømmer (aka Dreams (Sex Love)), directed and written by Norwegian filmmaker Dag Johan Haugerud. This is the first time a Norwegian film has claimed the honour and is the third installment of Haugerud’s Sex Love Dreams trilogy. Accepting the award on Friday night at the Berlinale Palast, Haugerud described the win as ‘beyond [his] wildest dreams’ and urged audiences to spend more time reading and writing.
His advice feels fitting given Drømmer’s clear engagement with literature and storytelling. Haugerud, also a librarian and novelist, weaves this other life into the heart of the film. We follow 17-year-old Johanne (played by Ella Øverbye) as she falls in love with her French teacher (Selome Emnetu). Johanne narrates their relationship through extensive voiceover – perhaps too extensively at times, for my taste – casting herself as the unreliable narrator. We are never quite sure how much of the relationship is imagined, fulfilled, or truthfully told to us, receiving various accounts from the various characters as the film goes on. Johanne even writes a novel about their relationship, which her mother Kristin (Ane Dahl Torp) and grandmother Karin (Anne Marit Jacobsen) read in a mixture of honour and awe, reinforcing the film’s literary preoccupation with subjectivity and truth.
The film is notable for its total focus on female relationships, both familial and otherwise. The dynamic between Johanne, her mother, and her grandmother echoes the interplay between Johanne and her older, female teacher, creating a distinctly female-centred narrative. At one point, Kristin and Karin come across another trio of women on a walk in the forrest and twice reference the Bronte sisters – a little heavy handed perhaps, but reflecting again the literary and feminist element of the film.
Kristin, understandably alarmed upon reading her daughter’s novel, fears Johanne has been abused, yet the film refuses to settle on a single interpretation. The affair’s sexual nature remains ambiguous: Johanne implies at different moments both that it was consummated and that it was not, while her teacher vehemently denies completely the affair. The result is a thought-provoking meditation on consent, power and perception, which is particularly impressive given the subject’s delicacy.
This same nuance extends to Drømmer’s approach to queer identity. When Johanne’s mother labels her as queer, Johanne appears indifferent and ridicules her mother’s categorisation, nodding towards Gen Z’s increasing rejection of traditional identity markers. Her relationship with her teacher is about love, passion and rejection, rather than a trope driven movie about a ‘queer awakening’ or queer coming of age.
Yet for all its thematic complexity, Drømmer didn’t strike me as the most compelling competition entry at this year’s Berlinale. Its locations lacked distinction, often feeling more like a Hallmark card than a setting with personality or life. This was particularly disappointing given how films like The Worst Person in the World so effectively portrayed Oslo – where Drømmer is also set. Moreover, its entire focus on wealthy middle-class intellectual anxieties feels self-indulgent at times, particularly in one of the film’s final scenes at the therapist’s office. While Drømmer is emotionally intelligent, it lacks the political urgency often associated with Berlinale winners, making its triumph an unexpected one – particularly in comparison to many of the other films in this year’s selection.
Film Fest Report is an accredited media at the 75th Berlin International Film Festival.
