The 2026 Palme d’Or recipient Fjord transforms the medium of cinema into an X-ray scanning the validity behind a society’s self-righteousness. This past Friday, I had the chance to interview its creator, Cristian Mungiu—the now two-time recipient of Cannes’ highest honor—at NEON’s campus roundtable.
I had the privilege of watching Fjord prior to its official US theatrical release. The film stars an unrecognizable, balding Sebastian Stan, who plays Mihail, a Romanian IT technician, opposite Renate Reinsve, who plays Lisbet, a meek Norwegian-native elder care nurse. Mihail and Lisbet head the Evangelical Gheorghiu family, and alongside their five kids, are settling into their new Norwegian coastal home.
As the parents navigate their new jobs and the children their new school, a school counselor spots a bruise on the back of eldest daughter Elia. Immediately, the family’s Christian parenting is brought into public and legal scrutiny against the progressive, secular Norwegian standard. Transforming into an Anatomy of a Fall-esque legal drama, the film stages a moral and societal dilemma based on a real-life event, where conservative parenting and lifestyle principles become the minority against a majority-progressive environment. It brings into question a society’s hypocrisy, the extent to which a progressive society can call itself accepting, and how much a parent can truly know their child.
After watching the film, I had to praise Mungiu’s delicate ability, within his tripart role as writer, producer, and director, to resist the temptation to impose his own moral judgments or an absolute conclusion onto the viewer. In his response and throughout the interview, Mungiu detailed his utmost obligation as creator to invoke the “critical spirit” of the audience, claiming, “I’m not this naive to believe that with films or with novation in general, you can change people’s opinions for good and into ours.”
This is, however, not to be confused with the assumption that Fjord takes no stance whatsoever. Mungiu explained how he embarked on the perspective of adults, rooted in his belief that they hold the keys to the world that will be passed on to the next generation. Rather than thinking a child’s education comes from conceptual or idealistic teaching passed from parent to child, Mungiu believes it is adults’ actions that leave the strongest mark on a child’s moral formation. He invites adults to abandon imposing rigid norms of behavior on their children and instead convey the real possibility of change outside one’s bubble—a bubble he deems conducive to intolerance, polarization, and violence. The first step, he says, is recognizing this broken cycle, granting children the freedom to do the same.
Mungiu creates a model of fiction that starts from reality, he said. It is not to be confused with reality itself, but his films aim to follow its pattern. He does not believe in a firm notion of “good” or “bad;” instead, he attributes these attitudes to an individual’s education and point of view.
Mungiu denies that his own judgments are to be read in those of his characters, who, akin to real-life people, are capable of manipulation. He gently rebukes the viewer’s tendency of looking for a face-value explanation of what a character says or does, and, through a few prudent and subtly snarky remarks at mainstream cinema’s impulse to hand-hold audiences through a story, he re-emphasizes his mission of training the critical spirit. He aims for the audience to reflect on their own experience in light of a fact-based story, and he does so without playing the didactic director, while still delivering an enjoyable cinematic experience.
When reflecting on Mungiu’s filmography across the years, thematic parallels emerge. At the roundtable, he consistently pointed to his 2022 film R.M.N., which he conceived in a similar vein to Fjord, based on a real event he read in the news. The two films are reversed mirrors of each other, both set in small towns. R.M.N. takes the backdrop of a xenophobic, multi-ethnic Transylvanian society, while Fjord appears as its counterpart, where a progressive, secular Nordic environment is challenged to welcome a devout Evangelical conservative family. In his own words, Mungiu seeks in Fjord to “reverse the paradigm [of R.M.N.], and to see what happens in a society when the conservatives are the minority.”
The true question Fjord poses pertains to those belonging to the majority. If you as a viewer find yourself in that majority, Fjord nudges you into the uncomfortable position of asking whether what matters most to you is the values you serve or the fact that you belong to said majority.
One of the student journalists asked Mungiu about the production’s resilience amid the indomitable weather of Ålesund, Norway. Mungiu replied with the following anecdote. On the first day of shooting, the crew was met with a fierce snowstorm, which forced them to start with an interior scene. This happened to be the emotional climax of the narrative: the moment Lisbet is told that they are being investigated for child abuse and that their children have been taken from them. Mungiu wanted to interiorize the external storm into Lisbet’s own emotional reaction. He wanted to compose the film so that what was outside the window could perform beyond mere background, as an external mirror of her reaction. “Bring me a flag,” he commanded the crew. They scattered around the neighboring houses for anything that could work, and the only offering was a giant Norwegian flag. The result is the film’s most masterfully composed shot: outside the cozy living room, the flag struggles to keep its composure amidst the storm that is coming to tear it down.
