19/05/2025 - The Norwegian director, a Berlinale winner, will lead the jury that will hand out the GdA Director’s Award for Best Film in the independent section of the 82nd Venice Film Festival

Director Dag Johan Haugerud (© Dario Caruso/Cineuropa)

Norwegian director Dag Johan Haugerud will preside over the jury of the Giornate degli Autori, the independent section realised within the framework of the 82nd Venice Film Festival and promoted by the Italian authors associations ANAC and 100autori. The winner of the Golden Bear at the latest Berlin Film Festival with Dreams [+see also:
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interview: Dag Johan Haugerud
film profile] (the last part in the trilogy made up of Sex [+see also:
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interview: Dag Johan Haugerud
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film profile], in competition at Venice that same year), Haugerud had already participated in the Giornate degli Autori in 2019 with Beware of Children [+see also:
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interview: Dag Johan Haugerud
film profile], later the winner of seven Amanda Awards, the most important recognition in Norwegian cinema.

“I’m very fond of the Giornate which, with a passionate and rigorous programme and a precise selection of only ten films, show particular attention to innovation, originality and independence”, declared Haugerud. “Art, literature and cinema are now more important than ever: they represent an opportunity for reflection both intellectual and political and – in the best cases – an expansion of sense. All across the world, cinema has the capacity to enact changes, as much on an individual level as in the whole of society.”

“The philosophical imprint of his cinema,” commented the artistic director of the Giornate Gaia Furrer, “is timeless and yet so suitable to today’s world, thanks to its profound investigation of our existential condition – the aspirations, the weaknesses and the shortcomings of us all. Haugerud strikes us with a gaze as tender as it is complex, indispensable to understand our tormented times.”

The other members of the Giornate degli Autori jury, together with the selection of the international competition and the whole programme of the Venice Film Festival (27 August - 6 September), will be announced in late July. The GdA Director’s Award for Best Film will be handed out on 5 September by the president of the jury to the auteur of the winning film of the 21st edition of the Giornate.

“Giornate president Francesco Ranieri Martinotti and myself”, concluded general delegate Giorgio Gosetti, “are happy to have, with Dag Johan Haugerud, a new cycle of this unique space for creative freedom and vitality, which in recent years has characterised the uniqueness of our independent section within the Venice Film Festival. His confirmation and loyalty to our idea of cinema demonstrates how the Giornate are now a shared reality in which authors are revealed, confirmed, and find again the pleasure of getting together for a shared passion.”

Dag Johan Haugerud has also worked as a journalist, as well as a playwright for various dance and theatre companies, and has published four novels. In 1998, he started directing with the short film 16 levende klisjeer. With his debut feature I Belong in 2012, he won the Norwegian Critics’ Prize and four Amanda awards.

(Translated from Italian)