NZIFF: Love
Schedule
Sun, 31 Aug, 2025 at 09:30 am
UTC+12:00Location
Century Theatre Napier | Napier, HB
What is love? Through the stories of a straight woman and a gay man, Haugerud defies conventions with humor and compassion, in an eloquent and moving masterwork on human relations in the 21st century.Trailer:
The age-old question finds a contemporary and adult declination in Dag Johan Haugerud’s final chapter to his Sex Dreams Love trilogy, premiered to universal acclaim at the Venice Film Festival 2024.
On the backdrop of the long and bright summer days of Oslo, straight woman Marianne and gay man Tor engage in parallel trajectories in the games of love, attraction, sex and empathy. Marianne, a urologist, and Tor, a nurse, work together at the hospital. After they casually meet on a ferry, as she goes for a date arranged by a friend and he is heading home, the two open up to each other and share their different searches for intimacy. She is looking for love by meeting recently divorced geologist Ole, he is looking for sex by meeting men on dating apps while riding the ferry – and that accidentally includes one of their patients, Bjorn. Through Haugerud’s effortlessly unpredictable writing, however, that ferry turns into a magic vessel where the destinies of his protagonists take unexpected turns...
With Love, Haugerud questions conventions with detached humor, yet he always treats his characters with profound compassion, delivering an eloquent and moving masterpiece on human relationships in the 21st century. — Paolo Bertolin
