Renate Reinsve as Lisbet Gheorghiu (centre-left) and Sebastian Stan as Mihai Gheorghiu (centre-right) in Fjord. Photograph: ©Tudor Panduru
(15, 146 mins, in cinemas from today)
The Palme d’Or, awarded every year at Cannes, is not only cinema’s highest accolade in France, but Europe-wide too. And, since Hollywood's Academy Awards are so determinedly parochial – a non-English-language film, Parasite, only won Best Picture for the first time in 2020 – it should probably also be considered world cinema’s highest accolade.
It’s a big deal, then, that Romanian director Cristian Mungiu is now among the handful of film-makers to have won the Palme d’Or twice (Francis Ford Coppola is the only American; Ken Loach the only Brit; Mungiu previously won in 2007 with abortion drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days). And it’s fitting that his second win, Fjord, is such a border-crossing, culture-clashing, outward-looking internationalist one.
After an establishing shot of the spectacular, mountain-framed inlet which gives the film its name, we’re soon taken into the home of the Gheorghius, a mixed-nationality, evangelical Christian family, who’ve recently relocated here, to Norway, the home country of mother Lisbet (Academy Award nominee Renate Reinsve), from Romania, where father Mihai (American-Romanian actor Sebastian Stan) was raised.
The film’s events may seem exaggerated by artistic licence, until you learn of the real-life Bodnariu family on which the story is based
At first the bilingual family seem to be settling in well; Lisbet is a conscientious nurse at the local elderly care home. Mihai, though qualified as an aeronautical engineer, takes a job as an IT consultant at the same school their children attend. On the first day, they’re greeted by two cheery teachers. “I’m Mats,” says one, in lingua-franca English, the third language of the film. “Your headmaster and also your neighbour.”
Initially, this small community is welcoming to the outsiders. Mats (Markus Tønseth) and his lawyer wife, Mia (Lisa Carlehed), have them round for apple cake, and the Gheorghius’ eldest girl, Elia, quickly forms a close bond with Noora, Mats’s rebellious daughter from a previous marriage. It’s all going smoothly, until a red mark on Elia’s face is noticed at school, Child Protection is called in, and the episode quickly escalates into both a heart-rending court battle and major diplomatic incident. These events may seem exaggerated by artistic licence, until you learn of the real-life Bodnariu family on which the story is based. In 2016, their case drew international attention to Norway’s Barnevernet child welfare agency for rashly separating families, especially immigrant ones.
A still from Fjord.
After 2022’s Saint Omer (about a Senegalese woman accused in French court of drowning her young daughter), and 2023’s Anatomy of a Fall (about a German woman suspected of murdering her French husband), Fjord may be the latest example of a newish genre I’m calling the euro-legal thriller. These are films which encourage us to wade into previously uncharted international waters, and there map out the murky grey areas around immigration, assimilation and community.
It’s as bracing as a blast of cold Trøndelagic air to be challenged to find your own way through an intricate ethical tangle
It takes a gripping euro-legal thriller to reveal just how often “we” – by which I mean cinema-going, Nerve-reading concerned citizens – are pandered to by the movies. Most, even those nominally for grown-ups, aim only to affirm our assumptions and reassure us of any niggling doubts. It’s as bracing as a blast of cold Trøndelagic air, therefore, to be challenged to find your own way through an intricate ethical tangle.
In Mungiu’s film there are no close-ups on tearful faces or emotive string scores to tell us what to feel and when. Instead, like German-Austrian film-maker Michael Haneke (another two-time Palme d’Or winner), he favours wide shots, held long enough for telling details to emerge. Like an approaching avalanche in the distance. Or a huge flag, waving insistently in the background. Or a taboo-but-tender romantic spark between two teenage girls. Or an “inclusive” Sámi dance performance at the apparently all-white school. That latter example is incidental to the plot, but contains ominous echoes for anyone familiar with Scandinavia’s historical policies of forced assimilation for the Indigenous minority.
This is film-making as unadorned and austere as the landscape, but that doesn’t preclude the possibility of miracles. (Keep watch for throwaway lines and things happening at the edge of frame.) Some reviewers have therefore accused Mungiu of siding with his conservative, religious countrymen against the secular, liberal values of their new home. It’s a reduction which ignores the third perspective in this three-way culture clash: yours, the viewer watching, which, informed by your own background, will – optimally – be something different again.
How do we care for each other across divides of religion, generation, culture and opinion? Where does the liberty of the individual (or family) end, and the responsibility of the community (or state) begin? There are no obvious answers here, but a fjord – symbolically and geographically speaking – is a place where extremes exist in close proximity, and where communities, cut off from the rest of the world, must bridge such gaps to survive.
Ellen E Jones is the Nerve’s film critic. A writer and broadcaster, her book Screen Deep: How Film and TV Can Solve Racism and Save the World (Faber) won the Kraszna-Krausz Prize. She co-hosts the BBC’s flagship film and TV programme, Screenshot, on BBC Radio 4, and won the Broadcasting Press Guild’s Presenter of The Year 2025