«Love is a force of nature»
– Annie Proloux, Brokeback Mountain
For about ten years now, I’ve travelled back and forth to several Norwegian film-festivals, hoping to find interesting, complex films, not otherwise shown in Norwegian cinema. One of these; Oslo Fusion, is a queer film festival taking place in early autumn – which has always felt like a sanctuary of strangeness and beauty.
Usually I devour at least six films in a week during ‘fusion’, but this year; with my epilepsy flaring I brought my mother and chose just one.
The chosen one; FREE, is a German coming-of-age story, who’s world-premiere was during the festival. It carried me away with its sweeping cinematography, gorgeous music, and a story so complex it refused to let me go.
More than anything Free is a film about love – but not the safe, expected kind.
It is about Sebastian and Kolja, two teenagers who meet and fall deeply for one another, only to discover that they are brothers.
The revelation shatters them, and us. Because by then we know their connection is real, not just through lust or fantasy, but something aching and alive, impossible to ignore.
The film forces its audience to ask: what happens when the heart breaks the rules the world has drawn around it?
The Law and the Heart
In turn of these issues, psychology offers one of its cruel truths:
children who grow up together rarely fall in love later in life,
as the bond formed between ages 0-10 shields them from desire.
On the other hand, if two close relatives (such as siblings or first cousins) meet as teens or as adults, the opposite can occur; connection and attraction blooms with startling force, and the brain does not know it should slam the brakes.
This is what FREE dares to show: that laws are clear, but emotions are not. What is illegal may still be inevitable, and the question hangs in the air: is it more harmful to rip love apart, or to demand that it survives forever in secrecy?
Forbidden Loves Trough Time
History is littered with romances declared «unnatural»;
Two men holding hands in public? Two women daring to build a life together? A black woman and a white man? A disabled person and a non-disabled lover? Hell, even unions across class and religion have been called dangerous.
And yet, time and again, society has been proven wrong. What was once scandalous becomes ordinary. What was once punished becomes celebrated.
Love pushes against walls until they crack.
Still, each age builds its own boundaries. The question is never does love exist here? But rather will we allow it to exist openly?
Why We Can’t Look Away
From Romeo and Juliet to Brokeback Mountain, from A Patch of Blue to Free;
we return to these stories of forbidden love because they strip love down to its rawest form: connection and desire that risks everything, devotion that refuses shame. They remind us that love is both the most fragile and most rebellious force we have.
We know, in our bones, what is to long for something that feels out of reach – to have our hearts caught in the tangle of rules, family, faith and fear. That ache is universal, even when the details differ.
Who Draws the Lines?
Every law is written by human hands, not by the stars. And still we must ask: who gets to decide where love begins and ends? Who is trusted to say this bond is sacred and this one is a crime?
When I walked out of the cinema, I was not only thinking of Sebastian and Kolja. I was thinking of all the boundaries I’ve watched people draw – around queerness, around disability, around who counts as «enough» to be chosen for love.
Perhaps love is never free. But it is always reaching for freedom
«For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks… the work for which all other work is but preperation.»
– Rainer Maria Rilke
A Task for You
Think back to what story of forbidden love has marked you most deeply? Was it a book? A film? Or was it a real person you once knew?
Write it down, and let yourself remember – not just the pain, but the beauty of love that dared to exist against the rules.
– Silje