“The Audience Is Much More Intelligent Than We Expect”: Cristian Mungiu On His Conversation-Starting Palme d’Or Winner Fjord

The Romanian writer-director’s sixth feature is a Pandora’s box of questions of values, religion, family and the justice system. It has been met with controversy since winning big at Cannes, but media hype or not, creating conversations is exactly what the 58-year-old wanted.

“I believe cinema should be used not only as entertainment but also as a weapon against hypocrisy and as a tool for practising your critical spirit,” Cristian Mungiu surmises. “It is important to avoid using cinema just for escapism, and to bring the spectators stories about themselves, the environment in which they live, and the answers they should search for [to create] a more inclusive and empathic society.”

The 58-year-old is a rare type of filmmaker who upholds a bold and uncompromising set of cinematic principles. His art not only reflects the society that it exists within, but it also doesn’t look to offer some form of momentary relief from the angst that imbues our increasingly complex world. What sets Mungiu’s work apart is its challenging of the very core fundamentals of morality, of culture, and of personhood, through a resilient sort of realism. 

Unbothered by the mechanics of political correctness, his canon tackles societal issues of everyday significance without agenda, dogma or bias. With a documentarian-like lens, he searches not just for truth, but for an acceptance of the differences that we innately have as humans. For, as a creator of art, it is not his position to judge – rather, to be a vehicle of understanding.

Some find Mungiu’s observational and striking filmmaking difficult to digest. Since his sixth feature film Fjord was crowned the winner of Cannes’ Palme d’Or prize in May – a second triumph in the festival for Mungiu following his devastating 2007 abortion drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days – it has become one of the most controversial films of the year. A subtle and deeply compelling depiction of religious conservatism, familial dynamics and cultural disparity, the NEON-disturbed work is essential viewing, one that should be consumed and spoken about with the same care and rationality that Mungiu made it with.

“A spectator told me that Fjord is like Rorschach: people rather see what they wish to see,” the director says. “It speaks about this polarised society. And the reactions to the film just confirm how difficult it is for some to step outside their firm belief that they hold the truth. During Cannes, too many people already had radical positions about the film even before watching it. I believe it’s wrong to answer radicalisation with radicalisation, and I am pleased when spectators scrutinise their own values and tolerance after watching the film.”

Inspired by real-life events from 2015, which Mungiu came across initially on the news and then spent a decade working on adapting and retelling as a feature film, Fjord follows an evangelist couple, Romanian Mihai (Sebastian Stan) and Norwegian Lisbet Gheorghiu (Renate Reinsve), who, after relocating from Mihai’s home country to a coastal town in his wife’s, find their life broken apart and in the midst of a legal scandal that spreads across European media. Their five children are taken away from them by the Child Protection Authority over suspicions that they have used physical abuse as a means of discipline, as well as extreme religious inculcation. What follows is a nail-biting courtroom saga that analyses the ambiguity of ethics and their interpretation across cultures.

“I started investigating the [subject matter], and I learned that it is not an isolated incident but rather a pattern.” Mungiu remembers his early years working on the project. “Whenever families with a more traditional upbringing migrate to Scandinavia, the cultural and educational differences lead to such conflicts when encountering the progressive views of those societies, known for their liberalism. Fjord is in a way a continuation of RMN, my previous feature. There I was investigating the ideas and reactions of conservative societies when facing minorities of any sort, while Fjord gave me the opportunity to look into how things change when the majority is progressive, and the minority is conservative. You would expect a very different dynamic, given their different views on liberty, tolerance and inclusion, but it seems that people tend to be abusive when they belong to any majority.”

“Investigating” feels like an apt word. Fjord is a think-piece without a sense of finality, not presenting either group in irrefutable righteousness. In that, and the sympathetic resonance that Mungiu places on the Gheorghiu family, some viewers have found issue, bemoaning its warmth towards outdated traditional values. “We live in a very polarised world, in bubbles that don’t communicate with one another, believing they hold the absolute truth and that everybody else is wrong,” he says. “Too often films were made just for the audience belonging to the same bubble as the storyteller. My wish was to act as a moderator, to make the audience listen to the point of the others, to make them aware that this other bubble won’t disappear and that we should look for solutions to enter into some sort of dialogue with those sharing different opinions than ours.”

To anchor a film of such magnitude, Mungiu required well-known actors, who could deliver a dual lead performance that could cope with the intensity of the issues at play, while remaining dynamic as inherently unflashy characters. And so, he recruited a pair of globally renowned thespians, both Oscar-nominated this decade – Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve.

Stan, who has been in and around the A-list of Hollywood for well over a decade now thanks to his recurring role as Bucky Barnes in Marvel films, including Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Avengers: Endgame, has in recent years reached a new level of acclaim thanks to performances in Aaron Schimberg’s black comedy A Different Man and as Donald Trump in Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice. He was born in Romania before emigrating to the United States as a 12-year-old, and Fjord marks the first film in which he has acted as a character from his birth nation. “Sebastian is a wonderful actor capable of very nuanced interpretations,” Mungiu extols on his leading man who has been attached to the film for the whole decade in which the director was working on it. “He knew Renate already. They played together [in A Different Man] and didn’t need a special period of getting to know each other. On top of that, it was essential for the actor playing Mihai to speak Romanian and English fluently. We needed somebody who could understand the background of his character, how it was to live and be educated in a very different society than the Scandinavian ones. And Fjord was a more expensive film than my previous ones, and I needed to work with well-known actors to finance it.”

Opposite Stan is Reinsve, a Norwegian who, after her work with Joachim Trier in The Worst Person In The World and Sentimental Value, has quickly established herself among the most critically acclaimed, stylistically adept screen actors working today. “Sebastian encouraged me to meet Renate, and I was eager to get to know her, given her wonderful performances in Joachim Trier’s films. We met in Oslo at the beginning of the casting process, and we read for both feminine parts in the screenplay. Even if [Renate] shares the progressive views of Mia, the other female character in the film, she felt closer and wished to interpret Lisbet, a mother forced to scrutinise her own values.”

Another main facet of the film is the five children, who undergo deep emotional turmoil across its 146-minute runtime, pulled away from their parents because of things they themselves told their teachers. To cast such nuanced roles at such a young age – ranging from early teens down to toddlers and a baby – and to produce realistic performances from them feels like an arduous task in concept, but Mungiu treated them as tantamount to their experienced elders. “It doesn’t differ too much from what I look at in actors in general,” he reasons. “[They need a] capacity for understanding the situation and delivering the dialogue with as little interpretation as possible. You need to pick the right actors, and I do this by checking during the casting if they – children or adults – can say their lines in a natural and truthful way.”

Filmmakers like Mungiu should be cherished. He was born and raised in Iași, an eastern city in his home country. Romania was never part of the Soviet Union but experienced its own strain of communist totalitarianism under the rule of Nicolae Ceaușescu. Mungiu considers himself one of the “fortunate ones to have had a lovely childhood despite difficult times.” He grew up with his parents and maternal grandparents, “surrounded by books, in a house with a big courtyard full of pets of all sorts.” At the time, due to the state’s dominant propaganda, he was unable to attend film school, and so instead filled his time “writing, taking pictures, going to a university in my hometown, reading.” Then, when “the VHS fever started, I was watching all the films that we could get our hands on, especially American: Coppola, Scorsese, Altman, Ashby, Spielberg, Lucas, Lumet, Friedkin. On top of that, an itinerant cinematheque started coming to town, which allowed us to see De Sica, Visconti, Fellini, Antonioni, Truffaut, Tarkovsky, Wajda, Kieslowski, Forman.” 

After studying English Literature, Mungiu spent his formative adult years as a teacher and a journalist. “My storytelling style is mostly formed by the books I read, the articles I was writing as a journalist and the belief that cinema should be a model of reality,” he reflects on how those years of learning and writing formed his cinematic outlook. After making several short films around the turn of the century, he’s gone on to make six solo feature-length pictures: his 2002 debut Occident; the aforementioned 2007 Palme d’Or winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days; 2012’s Beyond the Hills; 2016’s Graduation; 2022’s RMN and now, Fjord.

“It’s hard to say at this moment,” he feels, on where the latter effort sits within his filmography. “In form, Fjord doesn’t differ from my previous films, but the use of English and of better-known actors brought much more attention to it. For an auteur, what matters is to speak about something that is meaningful to you and that you know well enough to be able to structure it into a powerful and personal story.”

Where it does stand clear – in part at least thanks to his use of well-known stars and the media hype around it – is in being the most discussed and divisive of his career to date, forcing conversations and challenging the way we look at morality. It’s clearly not an outcome he resents. “I believe diversity in cinema should be saved,” he finishes defiantly. “Today we are pouring content into preexisting formats rather than being brave enough to go against the current, the norms, the expectations and create something more meaningful. The audience is much more intelligent than we expect.”

Fjord is in UK and Irish cinemas now.