Norwegian writer/director Dag Johan Haugerud only had a three-and-a-half week break in October 2022 between shooting two feature films — and he was struck by Covid for two of those weeks. Not ideal circumstances, but it was worth the suffering to realise his passion project, a trilogy of features called Sex Dreams Love.
“We want sex to be a result of love, most people’s dreams are about that. I wanted to take those things apart — even if we live in a western liberated society when it comes to sex, we still struggle with these issues and find it hard to talk about,” the writer/director says. He adds that each film also looks at freedom and queerness in different ways.
Sex — which premieres in the Berlinale’s Panorama on February 17 — is about two heterosexual men who suddenly find their feelings about sexuality, gender and identity challenged in different ways. Dreams is about a young woman’s first explorations of her sexuality, and Love is about a woman in her 40s who wants to have casual sex instead of a monogamous relationship.
For three standalone features, it has been a surprisingly quick process to envision and produce the films. Haugerud came up with the idea of a trilogy after his 2019 feature Beware Of Children premiered in the Giornate degli autori sidebar at Venice. Within a year, he had written all three scripts, with Love shooting in summer 2022, Dreams in winter of the same year, and Sex in early summer 2023. All filmed in different neighbourhoods of Oslo, with City Hall the only common location.
The ideal launch strategy for production company Motlys will be Sex in Berlin, Dreams in Cannes and Love in Venice, although the second and third films are still being finished and have not been seen nor selected by programmers; m-appeal handles international sales on Sex and has a first-look option on the others.
Producer Yngve Saether at Motlys recalls what an impossible task it seemed at first to get a trilogy financed. “It was a crazy idea,” he says. “It was unheard of to get public money for three films in a row.” But early buy-in from Norwegian Film Institute commissioner Cecilie Aspenes proved a crucial piece of the puzzle when she helped secure $1.8m towards the trilogy’s total production budget of $3.9m (nok41m).
Strong backing
Another potential source of financing, Norwegian public broadcaster NRK, decided to pass on the trilogy, but then Nordic platform Viaplay came to the rescue. “They read all three scripts and fell in love with it,” says Saether. (The platform has undergone recent restructuring but still plans to release the three films on its Nordic streaming services starting in late 2024.) Other backers included the Nordisk Film & TV Fond, Oslo Filmfond and distributor Arthaus, which will release Sex in Norway on March 1; TriArt is releasing in Sweden and Camera Film in Denmark.
The team could take advantage of some synergies for the three shoots — key crew were the same across the films, so pre-production for the first chapter helped create shorter prep timelines for the next two. “Practically we had to think about three different movies,” says the film’s other Motlys producer, Hege Hauff Hvattum. “It’s not like shooting a TV series when you decide one look and one feeling and try to do the same thing, it was three different movies.”
It was important for Haugerud that each film stood on its own with its own visual style and language, in the vein of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colours trilogy. “They are part of the same family but they look and feel very different,” he says. “Variation is important to me.”
Sex Dreams Love is just one in a line of creatively challenging projects backed by Motlys, the Oslo-based production company that was established in 1983 and now has a staff of 10. Other credits include Eskil Vogt’s feature directing debut Blind; Joachim Trier’s Oslo, August 31st, Louder Than Bombs and Thelma; feminist sports series Home Ground; and innovative political series Power Play, which won the Nordisk Film & TV Fond Prize 2024. “As a company, we want to wake up in the morning and do something meaningful,” says Saether.
In recent years, the firm has split its output about 50/50 between film and television. Motlys is next shooting the feature Stargate — A Christmas Story, directed by Ida Sagmo Tvedte and adapted from Ingvild H Rishoi’s popular holiday-themed novel.
“It all comes down to having good ideas and good talent you want to work with,” Saether says. “Dag Johan and I studied film in Stockholm together at the end of the ’80s so it feels meaningful to be working together.”
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