Fjord is Mungiu’s first film made outside Romania, and his first shot mostly in English. But the film deals with themes–of globalization, cultural conflict and the divide between rich and poor, East and West, traditional and progressive–that have recurred in his work.

Two decades after winning the Palme d’Or for 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007), an abortion thriller set in Communist-era Romania, Mungiu was back in Cannes with another challenging film about the clash between progressive and conservative values, and what it means to live in free society.

In Fjord, a Romanian Evangelical family, headed by father Mihai (Sebastian Stan) and mother Lisbet (Renate Reinsve), moves to Norway, only to be confronted by local welfare authorities, who view their traditional child-rearing methods — including corporal punishment — as child abuse. The legal trial that follows is as much about the family’s beliefs as about the alleged crimes committed.

Fjord: Multiple Award Winner

World premiering at the main competition, Fjord won the Palme d’Or, the François Chalais Prize, the FIPRESCI Prize, and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury.

What sparked the story for this film? 

I started from several articles in the press, but particularly one which is close to what you see in the film, and then I started noticing a pattern of such incidents. Some 10 years ago there was a conflict between a Polish family and the Danish authorities, and then a conflict between Indian family and the Swedish authorities, and then this case of a Romanian family and the Norwegian authorities. I saw this pattern of conflict between conservative and progressive values, and it’s more obvious to see it happening in the Nordic countries, because they are the most progressive in Europe.

Conflict between progressive society and conservative family?

That it is the main conflict I see around us in our societies today, from the U.S. and France and Italy and descending down from Norway to Romania. We live in very polarized society in which you have these two groups who believe that they are right, that they have the one truth. This has led to social violence which makes it impossible to live together in the same society. We are divided into groups that became so radicalized that we can’t find common ground.

We see this very often when the results of elections surprise us, because we haven’t talked to these people and we haven’t asked what they think about the society in which they live.

It’s important to use cinema to speak about the concerns we have about the direction in which our societies are going. That’s always the most important topic for me in my films — to understand the issues of the day.

This conflict, which doesn’t have clear solution, is something we need to tackle, and we need to look for some answers, because if not, we will just end up killing the others that don’t think the same way that we do.

First film made outside Romania

This film is not about the conflict between Romania and Norway. It’s more than this: It’s the conflict between a layer of society which had access to privilege, education and wealth, access that allows people to be more empathic, and the level of society of people with fewer opportunities which have conservative views.

A big difference in Norway was that they only work 8 hours a day, even film crews! It was a shock for us. I mean cinema was born in California, you need the sun, and you work all day. But little by little, we managed to overcome these differences and focus on things that we have in common. We ended up as a single crew working on the same film.

There’s was a funny incident that shows the difference between the societies. We found this lovely location with two neighboring houses [to play the homes for the conservative family and their progressive neighbors], and easily convinced one family to let us shoot there, but we couldn’t contact the other owner. We kept asking our Norwegian partners to contact these people, and they kept telling us “Well, we left him a note.” We said, “Why don’t you go and knock on the door and talk to him?” They said “That’s not how we do things.”

Eventually, after we shot there, they became good friends. They needed somebody from outside with different set of values to show them they had a lot in common. But there was too much respect for privacy in the culture.

I’m not this kind of optimistic person saying, “Hey, don’t worry.” I don’t think that things go naturally in the right direction. We need to make some effort to keep them in the right direction, always.

If you watch what happens today, we see that people are a little bit tired of democracy, because democracy is not something natural — it requires effort. Empathy requires effort. We are not born empathic when we’re children. We’re very selfish. This comes with education.

We need to make an effort of generosity, to share our wealth with poorer areas and societies, if we wish the world to advance in the right direction. We can’t just advocate for social liberal causes to people who don’t have clean water. We need to get more involved. We need to understand that people with more resources acquire more empathy. We can’t just vote for inclusion and empathy, we need to practice it, and this requires effort.

Balancing tolerance in liberal democracy with people who reject democratic values?

This is why I made the film in Norway, not in Belarus. There is no debate in Belarus. I come from a communist country. There was no debate about your right to doubt what was imposed as truth in society.

But I hope there is still room in a democratic society to talk about the values you are having and the most appropriate way of spreading them around. I have respect for Norway and for the Nordic countries. It’s a very civilized society. They need to be less rigid in understanding that not everybody was so fortunate to reach this level of empathy.

You need to be patient, and you need to find ways of engaging in dialogue. It’s not helpful to say, “Trust me, this is going to be good for you.” You still need to convince people and invest in educating people, not enforcing your values, even if you are certain that it’s for their own benefit.

This film is about fundamentalism. If you have mindset of fundamentalism, it’s not such a big difference between right-wing and left-wing fundamentalism. We should meet somewhere in the middle and start by accepting that some people won’t have the same values as we have.

I think they are smart enough to accept criticism, while a conservative society wouldn’t be smart enough to accept criticism. I was very happy to see that their reaction was accepting that maybe they still have things to improve, and this is what I was hoping from such a civilized society.

The danger is more when you’re trying to bring this kind of subtle balance into a conservative society, because there, things are simpler. You don’t have the right to doubt things.

I hope to stir things and create a polemic. The film is just the trigger for a conversation that we need to have in society, and I hope that many people will start from the film to feed this conversation, trying to speak openly about things that were not spoken openly about for too long.

Cinema has a part in this as well. I think that films became too political in the last 10 or 15 years, always confirming the “right values.” We need to balance this with films that allow us to express doubts about these values. This is part of democracy and freedom that we need to keep alive as well.

Sebastian Stan?

I met Sebastian some 10 years ago. He came to see me after screening in New York of Graduation. It was very funny, because his mother drove him 400 kilometers from upstate New York so that we could meet.

For this film, I told him, “I’m sure you can play the dramatic role, I’ve seen that in your other films, but you look too much like a Hollywood star. But this guy is not [Stan’s MCU character] Bucky.”

We needed physical change to make him into this humble person raised in a society where he didn’t have any rights. I said: ‘What if we make you bald?” He wasn’t sure. So we put an ad on Instagram in Norway: “Looking for Sebastian Stan fan that wishes to be shaved to be a stand-in.” We got one, shaved him, did the test and Stan liked how it looked.

The bald bit helped him a lot, because he’s a method actor. He needs to be close to the character, and this humbleness and not being proud of how he looks brought him closer to Mihai.

It also helped that he and Renate had worked together before, on A Different Man (2024). We had little time to prepare. When they arrived on set we needed to shoot right away. It helped that they knew each other beforehand. They already had the chemistry.

Fear that the film might be embraced by right-wing groups?

Absolutely. I think this is going to happen, but it’s a risk that I thought was worth taking in order to defend this right that we’re still having to doubt the values in which we believe, and also to speak about manipulation.

I’m used to it, we need to use our critical filters when we look at these topics. Expressing doubts about our liberal society doesn’t mean that I’m defending conservative society. It means that I trust progressive society in its capacity for admitting self-criticism.