On November 10, Scandinavia House presents a special screening of the 2026 Palme d’Or winner and Romania’s official entry for Best International Feature Film at the 99th Academy Awards: the thorny, riveting, and Norwegian-set drama Fjord.
Fjord
Dir. Cristian Mungiu | Romania/France/Norway/Sweden/Denmark, 2026 | 146 min
“A brilliantly knotted social drama” (Variety) – Romanian-Norwegian couple Lisbet (Renate Reinsve) and Mihai (Sebastian Stan) move with their five children to Lisbet’s remote Norwegian hometown, where their conservative Evangelical beliefs set them apart from the otherwise progressive community. When they come under suspicion over their parenting, Norway’s child-protection system enters their private lives, and as their beliefs face public scrutiny, a clash of values turns into an morally prickly battle over who gets to decide what constitutes a good family.
A foundational figure of 21st-century Romanian cinema, Cristian Mungiu earned his second Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for this searing, discomfiting social drama. Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve give superbly restrained performances as Mihai and Lisbet. Mungiu refuses to supply easy answers or simple paths to identification in this compelling provocation, which poses unresolvable questions to viewers about our biases and presumptions. Fjord returns the director to many of his recurring themes: the freedom of the individual within contemporary political systems, the culture clash between modernity and tradition, and how human care can imperceptibly evolve into a form of control.
ABOUT THE DIRECTOR
Cristian Mungiu was born in Iași in 1968. After studying English Literature at university, he worked as a teacher and journalist for the written press, radio and television. He then attended the Film and Theatre Academy in Bucharest and made a number of short films. His first feature film, Occident, premiered at the Directors’ Fortnight in 2002 and was a triumph back in Romania. In 2007, his second film, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, in Competition at the Festival de Cannes, was awarded the Palme d’or. The film received critical acclaim and won several international distinctions including the European Film Academy awards for Best Film and Best Director. He returned to Cannes in 2009 as a writer-producer-co-director with the collective film Tales from the Golden Age and as a writer-director in 2012 with Beyond the Hills – double awarded for Best Screenplay and Best Actresses. He was a member of the Jury headed by Steven Spielberg at the 66th Festival de Cannes (2013). Graduation – his fifth film presented in Cannes – won the award for Best Director in 2016.