Écran Large is back on the Croisette for the Cannes Film Festival 2026. And it’s time to revisit Fjord, the Palme d’Or–winning film by Cristian Mungiu (4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, RMN) featuring Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve.
Having won the Palme d’Or in 2007 for 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, the Romanian filmmaker Cristian Mungiu has become a Cannes regular (Beyond the Hills, Graduation, RMN). With Fjord, he seems to step out of his comfort zone as much as he does out of his familiar territory, since it tells the story of a Romanian-born family arriving in Norway. In reality, the director leans into a proposition as logical and controlled as the rest of his filmography, turning a microcosm of a family into a conduit for social resonance. A Palme d’Or–worthy film?
Having Kids, They Said
What’s it about? The Gheorghiu, a devout Romanian-Norwegian family, settles in a village at the end of a fjord. When the teachers discover bruises on Elia, the eldest Gheorghiu child, the community wonders whether the parents’ traditional upbringing could be to blame.
What does it amount to? In an exemplary democratic society, should intolerance be tolerated? In the face of the rise of the far right across many territories (including France, which has never managed to impose a sanitary cordon like its Belgian neighbors), the question is on everyone’s lips, fueling a cultural war that grows more dichotomous by the day between progressivism and conservatism. Contrary to what some Cannes critics argued, Cristian Mungiu does not seek to tilt the balance to one side, and instead uses the ambiguity of his direction to keep the two camps facing each other.
This stance, at once brave and unnerving, gives Fjord that pebble-in-the-shoe quality we probably need. Inspired by various true incidents, it tells how a Christian family from Romania—the father Mihai (Sebastian Stan, notably restrained, and for the first time speaking in his native language)—moves to Norway, the mother’s homeland Lisbet (Renate Reinsve, who expands her range yet again).
With its horizon of water that seems to stretch forever, the feature quickly forges an enclave that feels inviting at first. The whole neighborhood knows each other, and the Gheorghius quickly strike up a friendship with the Halbergs, whose husband turns out to be the principal of the local school. But as in any good Desperate Housewives episode, this closeness gives rise to a rapidly toxic rumor mill, especially the day when injuries on a child’s body are linked to the parents’ archaic educational methods.
The Norwegian Child Welfare procedures, proven to be effective, act immediately in what is assumed to be the children’s best interests, aiming to separate the siblings from their home. On the other hand, everything unfolds very quickly—perhaps too quickly—so much so that the director’s editing remains unforgiving in the face of Mihai and Lisbet’s almost startling lack of recourse. Their Christian kindness is not to be questioned, but behind the benevolent facade lies a mercifully ambiguous vision of punishment and forgiveness.
Should we tolerate the couple’s beliefs when they evangelize with fervor, and as it proves increasingly incompatible with the Republic? The film’s great strength is that it takes this question inside a microcosm, before the failures of a cold and inflexible bureaucracy drag the affair into a macrocosm beyond control. Building on the cultural difference it depicts, as well as the semantic subtleties (is a spanking as grave as the verb “to beat”?) Fjord is built on the inability of dialogue, which exploits the buried anger of its characters—whatever side they’re on—like an abrasive fuel.
Between the blocked horizons and the anxiety-inducing spaces, the domestic milieu becomes that shadowy, terrifying zone, filled with traumas and fears we try to define. Mungiu has the right idea to preserve this delicate structure in a much stronger blur than any prechewed answer, even if his zeal for nuance and thoroughness doesn’t prevent some lulls and redundancies. Nevertheless, the poker-faced performances from his cast, judged both by the rest of the community and by the audience, invite an interpretation that can only suffer from its circumstances, not always favorable to humanity.
The sense of injustice that spreads through the frame allows the film to taint this intimate story with political opportunism, a logical trajectory of a moral tale about the hijacking of our values.
And when is it coming out? August 19, 2026 via Le Pacte.
