Director: Dag Johan Haugerud
A teenager's secret notebook becomes the spark for a quietly funny, deeply human story about first love in Dag Johan Haugerud's 2025 Norwegian drama Dreams.
What is Dreams about?
Seventeen-year-old Johanne fills page after page with the private, feverish record of her crush on her French teacher. She never intends anyone else to read it, but when her mother and grandmother stumble across the notebook, the discovery changes all three of their lives. What follows isn't a scandal story so much as a study in how a family reacts when a child's inner world is suddenly laid bare. The mother is unsettled by what she reads, yet she can't look away from how well her daughter writes. The grandmother, further removed and freer with her opinions, sees something else entirely in the pages. As the three generations argue, reread, and reconsider, Johanne keeps living the romance in her head, half oblivious to the storm her writing has caused at home. Haugerud, working in Norwegian with a cast led by newcomer Ella Overbye alongside Ane Dahl Torp and Anne Marit Jacobsen, builds the film around conversation rather than incident, letting the comedy and the ache sit side by side.
Cast & crew
Ella Overbye anchors the film as Johanne, playing the diary-writing teenager with an unguarded, watchful quality that carries most of the film's close-up scenes. Ane Dahl Torp and Anne Marit Jacobsen play her mother and grandmother, and the trio's scenes together do most of the film's heavy lifting, with Selome Emnetu also featured in a supporting role.
Context & significance
Dreams is the third part of director Dag Johan Haugerud's loose Oslo-set trilogy about desire and self-discovery, released the same year as its companion films. It premiered on the festival circuit in 2025 and drew notice for treating a teenager's crush with unusual seriousness rather than played for easy embarrassment.
Where & how to watch
Dreams streams on K-Time with Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles, part of the platform's push to bring festival and arthouse cinema to Farsi-speaking audiences. The film page is free to read without an account; watching the film itself requires logging in, and the full K-Time experience, including search and recommendations, is available in Farsi.