One of the unexpected triumphs of this year’s Cannes Film Festival was Christian Mungiu’s refreshing family drama. Fjord Winning the Palme d’Or. In a rare feat, the Romanian director has won the Grand Prix at Cannes twice. “It’s really great to get the Palme d’Or,” he told French television network Brut minutes after leaving the awards ceremony. “Getting two Palme d’Or awards? I don’t know, this is just a waste of time?” He laughed shyly. “There are a lot of great directors who never get it.”
The writer-director received his first Palme in 2007 4 months, 3 weeks and 2 daysAn unnerving drama about a young college student who attempts an illegal abortion in the late 1980s, when communist leader Nicolae Ceaușescu still ruled Romania. This latest award for Fjord It elevates Mungiu to a rare club of two-time winners – only nine other directors, including Francis Ford Coppola, have achieved this over the festival’s 79-year history.
But what’s even more surprising is that, in a year in which a third of traditionally left-leaning competing films featured LGBTQ characters, Fjord It is not an appeal to progressive values, but rather a criticism of them. Specifically, it is an image of liberal extremism that prides itself on tolerance but leans toward a coherent, dogmatic ideology reminiscent of the totalitarian groupthink that has dominated Mungiu’s homeland for decades.
In the film, parents of different nationalities, Georgius – IT consultant husband Mihai (Sebastian Stan) is Romanian, and housewife Lisbet (Renata Rensev) is Norwegian – move with their five children from Romania to a small town in Norway. The religious couple hopes to give an idyllic pastoral upbringing to their Bible-quoting brood (two teenagers, two teenagers and a baby), despite the family’s gradual realization that society is quietly but aggressively secular.
But when a teacher sees unexplained bruises on a child, government agents step in and immediately separate the children from their mother and father, placing the minors in foster care until a local court determines whether they are being abused. The forced separation continues for months. A cloud of suspicion immediately hangs over the now tainted Georgius, who is instantly ‘othered’ – and whose preference for the Roman ‘Familia Traditionala’ is seen not as old-fashioned conservative values, but as a threat.
The Norwegian government’s aggressive interference in family matters may seem suspiciously melodramatic, but in fact it is rooted in reality. “I read the first articles about situations like this about ten years ago,” Mungiu said at the press conference following the film’s premiere. “I finally started documenting it four years ago. I went to Norway and talked to people involved in such situations: police, judges, NGOs, journalists. After ten years of trying, I wrote about three pages before sending the story to Sebastian. I said to him: ‘I finally think we have something we can do together.’”
Stan, a familiar face in Hollywood due to his appearances in Marvel films as Bucky Barnes (aka The Winter Soldier) and a 2024 Oscar nominee for his role as Donald Trump in traineeseems like an odd choice to play the lead role in an art film with subtitles. But the Romanian-born actor has been a long-time fan of Mungiu. “I’ve known Christian for a long time,” Stan said at the press conference. “I think the first time we met was when it came out graduation At the New York Film Festival. I brought my mother!”
This 2016 film, which won Mungiu the Best Director Award at Cannes, follows a doctor trying to influence his daughter’s final exams and secure her a college scholarship. As is usual in his films, Mungiu uses graduation To examine how overbearing institutions sow corruption among those in positions of power and detrimentally impact personal lives. in FjordThe same applies to the Norwegian viewpoint which is critical of the belief systems of foreigners – especially when they lean to the right.
“You’re talking about discrimination, right?” Stan said. “I grew up in a fairly traditional Romanian environment. So I kind of understood a lot of what was going on in the scenario. How do we all deal with it? I think the only way to do that is to stay as honest as possible and think about your own morals and values, and be the example that you want to see in the world.”
Mungiu insisted Fjord It is not intended to condemn Norway. He gives them credit for revising some of the strict laws recently to be more humane. “It is important for me to say that the legislation in Norway changed between the moment I started the investigation and the moment I shot the film,” he said. “This is not a film about a conflict between Romania or Norway or anything like that, or a criticism of Norwegian society. This is, for me, more complex and complex. It’s about the limits of intimacy and freedom, and what happens when your personal values don’t align with the values of the society you want to live in in this global world.”
American journalists in Cannes were wondering whether a film so sympathetic to religious conservatives might fare well in the United States, or whether it would be stifled by a liberal-leaning press that might feel uncomfortable with the film’s political nuances. This Palme d’Or win is now awarded Fjord More oxygen to breathe. Cementing its place in awards season conversations this fall is its local distributor, Neon, which has released all six previous Palme d’Or winners, leading two, parasite and Anurawinning the Academy Award for Best Picture.
“I couldn’t make the opposite story of this movie, about some progressive people living in a traditional society. Because there, you don’t have any rights,” Mungiu added. “You can only do this in a democracy. Freedom means that you can follow your values, even if you live abroad and live in the middle of a different society.”
More in the movie
