Raluca Pop reviews Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord, the Cannes Palme d’Or-winning film this year.
In Norway, the Child Welfare Services (Barnevernet) operates under a mandate that is unusually expansive by comparative European standards. It has the legal authority to intervene pre-emptively in family life when risk is assessed, rather than waiting for demonstrable harm. This preventive logic generated sustained domestic support, but also persistent international unease, particularly in cases involving migrant or religious minority families. It is within this tension that the Romanian director Cristian Mungiu situates his filmic reconstruction of the Bodnariu case of 2015-2016, when five children were removed from a Romanian-Norwegian evangelical family amid allegations ranging from corporal punishment to “religious indoctrination”. On social media, the case of Bodnariu stirred controversies. Politicians used is as a political weapon.
The director has long been preoccupied with systems that translate moral ambiguity into bureaucratic certainty. He is best known for directing 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007. His work focuses primarily on ethical dilemmas and centres around the everyday life of the individual (or minorities) who make choices that clash with larger institutional or political systems. His latest movie, Fjord, follow the same approach and brought his second Palme d’Or this year.
The movie follows Mihai and Lisbet Gheorghiu, played by Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve, and their five children who move from Mihai’s homeland, Romania, to a small town on a fjord in Norway, Lisbet’s native country. Initially, the family is welcomed into the town. Mihai gets a job in the IT sector with the help of a fellow Christian from the same church, while Lisbet accepts a nurse position. They build a new life, enrolling four of their children in school, while the fifth is only a few months old.
As in his earlier movies, Mungiu does not provide a privileged interpretation. The competing accounts are allowed to coexist in a state of permanent tension.
The Gheorghiu family enters the administrative gaze after their eldest daughter, Elia, shows up to gym class with bruises on her body. The teachers notify the Norwegian Child Welfare Services, and an investigation is put in motion when Elia and Emmanuel (eldest son) admit that their parents sometimes slap them if they misbehave. From that moment, the situation ceases to belong to the family alone. Instead, it is absorbed into a procedural sequence in which testimony, classification, and risk assessment begin to redefine the facts themselves.
Mungiu then shifts the focus to the Gheorghiu’s neighbors, the Mats’ family. Illustrated almost in opposition, Mats is the school principal, and Mia is a former lawyer. Their daughter, Noora, becomes the bridge between these two worlds, forming a close friendship with the Gheorghiu children. While Noora has been raised in a progressive environment, Elia and Emmanuel live under strict rules, among which not having access to social media. Despite different domestic regimes, the children do not reproduce the antagonism that organizes the institutional world. Here, Cristian Mungiu deconstructs the usual assumption that divergent value systems produce social incompatibility. Instead, at the level of everyday interactions the issue is much more nuanced.
Mia’s position is equally ambivalent. She agrees to represent Lisbet and Mihai in the civil trial, arguing the fact that both sides have the same outcome, namely the welfare of the children. The broader question at stake here is who has the authority to define good parenting.
Mungiu uses this conflict to tackle a delicate question: how tolerant is a liberal society when confronted with situations that depart from its own norms?
This conflict between family and authority highlights the prejudice towards religious expression within Norway. Despite the liberal values often associated with Norwegian society, such as freedom of speech, the teachers caution the children against overly open religious expression. When Elia plays a gospel song on the piano in the school’s canteen, she is interrupted by one of the teachers. Even Mats, the friendly neighbour and the school principal that seems to be very welcoming, admits to his wife that he thinks Gheorghiu’s children are a bad influence on Noora. In turn, Mihai mentions a few times that Elia and Emmanuel might have grown too close to Noora. In this regard, both sides have their own concerns. Yet, the film suggests much more than a simple tension as old as the world: power dynamics might contribute to the central imbalance. The majority has the upper hand in defining the acceptable and non-acceptable differences. Mungiu shows how a democratic and progressive society that protects and embraces diversity can nonetheless become intolerant of a minority that does not share the same views.
Ultimately, the conflict remains unsolved. Rather than offering a verdict, Mungiu invites the audience to reach its own conclusions. This ending also suggests that a democracy is not entirely based on compromises between different beliefs and worldviews, but on learning how to tolerate disagreement and to live with differences. When institutions stop tolerating dissimilar ideals and different groups stop communicating with each other and retreat into their own way of thinking, democracy becomes more of a contest to impose whose values deserve to prevail.
The natural setting plays a central role in intensifying the film’s tensions. In this movie, Mungiu uses two visual clues: nature and light.
The fjords and snowy mountains remain still in the face of the conflicts they contain, reinforcing the image of a society that appears to be calm and harmonious. However, Mungiu uses this stillness to heighten the contrast. The landscape becomes dynamic when two avalanches affect the school. The first one stops before it reaches the school. It is barely noticed by the characters. The second one, is stronger and engulfs the school in a snowy mist. Yet, no one panics. They simply follow the protocol. The metaphor is difficult to miss. Cases such as the Gheorghiu family are disruptive, but they do not fundamentally alter the system that produces them.
Lighting is another device that reinforces this tension. The early scenes in the Gheorghiu household, such as Bible studies, family evenings and church community gatherings, are bathed in warm, intimate light. After the children are taken away, this palette shifts to darker and colder tones, which might reflect grief and isolation.
Fjord is an uncomfortable and even frustrating watch. It might leave the viewer with unresolved questions: Did the teachers act hastily because they found the Gheorghiu’s family behaviour and beliefs different or were they rightly concerned? Where is the line that an institution can’t cross to protect its citizens? In what way can democracy fail to protect the freedom of every individual?
Set against a strikingly beautiful yet cold landscape, Mungiu exposes the interior struggles of an immigrant family that is faced with prejudice and suspicion. In this context, institutions cease to accommodate different voices and democracy risks to turn into a contest over prevailing values.
Raluca Pop is an Assistant Editor at the Review of Democracy.
