Alan in Belfast: Oslo Stories Trilogy: Dreams – knitting a blurred boundary between infatuated fact and fiction (Queen’s Film Theatre until Thursday 7 August)

High school student Johanne has a crush on Johanna, a teacher who takes her for a couple of subjects. At first, it’s an internalised teenage infatuation, but slowly it begins to affect Johanne’s mood, attendance and wellbeing. In the film’s most difficult to swallow moment, 17-year-old Johanne and Johanna begin to meet regularly outside school setting off safeguarding alarm bells in the audience’s minds but never in the thoughts of the film’s characters. (The second pill to swallow is why textile design-trained Johanne is teaching French!)

Norwegian screenwriter and director Dag Johan Haugerud laces Dreams – part of a trilogy (with some gentle cross-over appearances) that also includes Sex and Love – with a heavy swig of ambiguity. The power of books to open up imagination and self-growth is introduced. What nearly feels like a 70-minute film extends for another 40 minutes to see the fallout when, a year later, Johanne shares her intimate memoir/novel with family members, making them aware of how she wants to remember her secret relationship with Johanna. Her grandmother and mother read and react in very different ways, and proceed to flip positions over time as insecurities emerge.

Ella Øverbye plays the gifted linguist and talented dance student who narrates around half of this pleasantly but unusually constructed film. Øverbye takes Johanne from yearning to obsession and back. Hints are planted that her teacher (played by Selome Emnetu with gentle warmth until a more defensive coldness envelopes her persona) may not be as innocent as we witness on screen. Without getting too spoilerific, Haugerud also allows us to witness the teacher’s impression of the one-sided work of autofiction, making the audience further question who was doing the grooming and how deep any actual abuse goes.

A grandmother’s dreams of success as a poet are undermined by a precocious greanddaughter’s potential to publish a feminist bestseller or a tale of queer awakening. A single mother’s love life is rattled by her daughter’s intimate revelations, whether they’re real or imagined. By the end, we’ll find out how Johanne looks back on this period and if she can move forward. Does a first love have a positive or negative legacy?

The sets are almost as gorgeous as Johanna’s knitware. Haugerud storytelling and Cecilie Semec’s cinematography are dominated by the ascent and descent of stairs (along with a neat shot of tea brewing). These scenes are beautiful to watch, symbolic, and moments to consider where to move the line between truth and fiction! The single scene with freeze frame jars and unfortunately feels out of place.

Dreams is being screened in Queen’s Film Theatre until Thursday 7 August. The other parts of the trilogy will also be screened during the month of August: Love from Friday 15, and Sex from Friday 22.