Fjord

The Gheorghiu family moves to a small Norwegian town, Ålesund, the mother's birthplace. Lisbet is a nurse, Norwegian-born; her husband Mihai is a Romanian aeronautical engineer; they have five children, including a newborn. The settlement, hemmed in by mountains and water, welcomes everyone warmly, and everyone here wears several hats: the school headteacher is also the welcome committee, the bus driver is also an adviser to child protection services. For a while it all looks like the ordinary friction of people adjusting to one another. Then someone notices two bruises on the elder daughter, and within hours all five children are removed from their parents. A civil trial and a criminal trial follow.

The story isn't invented. Mungiu worked from real cases: over the past decade, several conflicts between Norwegian child protection services and immigrant evangelical Christian families grew into international affairs, with demonstrations and diplomatic complications. The film fuses them into one, and makes no secret of which side it is watching from: its argument is that for Scandinavian progressivism there are also "wrong types of minorities", whose rights count for less.

Cristian Mungiu made his debut in 2002 with Occident in the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes, and has returned to the main competition five times since. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days won the Palme d'Or in 2007 — the film that fixed the Romanian New Wave on the world map for good. Beyond the Hills (2012) took the Best Screenplay prize at Cannes, with both of its leads sharing Best Actress; Graduation (2016) won him Best Director. R.M.N. (2022) was about a mixed Romanian-Hungarian-German village in Transylvania that turns on a group of Sri Lankan guest workers — so the subject of Fjord is not new territory for him. His body of work circles a single question: what happens to an individual when a system — state, church or community — decides what is right. He works in long takes, without a score, and usually without villains. The most interesting argument in Fjord's reception is whether, this time, there are some after all.

This is Mungiu's first film shot outside Romania and not in Romanian — a significant departure. Its characters speak Norwegian, Romanian and English, and it was shot in Ålesund in spring 2025. The cinematographer is Tudor Vladimir Panduru, who has worked with the director since Graduation (2016), and who again keeps his distance from the action so that we can see where the characters stand within the larger picture. The contrast between the landscape and the story is one of the film's strongest effects: above the fjords there is silence, and beneath them a community is making its decisions.

Sebastian Stan plays Mihai — himself Romanian-born, returning here quite literally to his first language, and by most accounts barely recognisable. Renate Reinsve (The Worst Person in the World) plays Lisbet with an unusually closed, unreadable performance.

The film premiered at Cannes in May 2026 and won the Palme d'Or, making Mungiu the tenth director in the festival's history to take the top prize twice — the first time in 2007 with 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. Critics, even so, are not unanimous. The Sight and Sound reviewer found the imagery magnificent but argued that Mungiu builds his case against the child protection service so single-mindedly that he ends up doing to his opponents exactly what he accuses them of doing to the Gheorghius: stripping them of a human face. That argument is part of the film too — expect no consensus after the screening.