Nearly two decades after winning the Palme d’Or 4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days (2007), an abortion thriller set in communist-era Romania, Cristian Mungiu returns to Cannes with another challenging, and perhaps deeply divisive, film about the clash between progressive and conservative values and what it means to live in a free society.
in FjordThe film follows a Romanian evangelical family, headed by father Mihai (Sebastian Stan) and mother Lisbet (Renate Rensef), who moves to Norway, only to be confronted by the local social welfare authorities, who view their traditional methods of child-rearing – including occasional corporal punishment – as child abuse. The following legal trial is as much about their beliefs as it is about the crimes allegedly committed.
Fjord It is Mungiu’s first film made outside Romania, and his first shot (at least partly) in English, but the film reflects the themes – globalization, cultural conflict, the divide between rich and poor, East and West, traditional and progressive – that define his work.
Hollywood Reporter He spoke with Mongiu in Cannes about the real-life inspiration behind the film, working with Stan, and why he believes cinema should provoke controversy rather than assert ideological certainty.
What sparked the story of this film? Was there an inciting incident?
Absolutely, yes. In fact, I started from several articles in the press, but especially one that was very close to what you see in the movie, and I started to notice a kind of pattern of such incidents. About 10 years ago, there was a conflict between a Polish family and the Danish authorities, then a conflict between an Indian family and the Swedish authorities, and then this case between a Romanian family and the Norwegian authorities. Little by little, I saw this pattern of conflict between conservative values and progressive values, and it is very clear to see this happening in the Nordic countries, because they are the most progressive in Europe.
I have followed the Romanian case in detail. I ended up calling the families and talking to them. I went to Norway to talk to prosecutors, judges, the press and journalists. Finally, I decided to make the story fictional, not reenact it. So that’s not what actually happened, but the story isn’t far from what I found out.
What attracted you to this particular conflict between a progressive society and a conservative family?
Well, I think that’s the main conflict that I see around us in our societies today, from the United States, France, Italy, down from Norway to Romania. I think we live in a very polarized society where you have these two groups of people who believe that they are right, that they have the one truth, and this has led to a kind of social violence that makes it impossible to live together in the same society. We have divided into groups that have become so extreme that we cannot find common ground.
We see this often when election results surprise us, because we did not talk to these people and did not ask them what they thought of the society in which we live.
I think it’s important to use cinema to talk about the concerns we have about the direction our societies are headed. This is always the most important theme for me in my films – understanding the issue of the day.
I think this conflict, which has no clear solution, is something we need to address, and we have to look for some answers, because if not, we will end up killing others who don’t think the same way we do.
This is your first film produced outside Romania. How different is Norwegian society and the Norwegian bureaucracy, which plays a pivotal role in the film’s plot, compared to Romania?
First of all, it is important for me to stress that this film is not about the conflict between Romania and Norway. It’s way more than this. It’s the conflict between a layer of society that has access to privilege, education, and wealth, access that allows people to be more compassionate, and a level of society that includes people who have fewer opportunities and have these conservative views.
But of course Norway is a very different society from Romania, when you go there and see that they don’t look at the world in the same way. When we arrived, we were locking our doors and taking our wallets with us, and they kept asking us why, saying “we don’t do that here.” We may say: “But there may be bad people, thieves.” They said: No, there is not. Then we joked, “Well, we brought this big Roman crew with us, so don’t be sure.”
The big difference in working in Norway was that they only worked eight hours a day. Even the film crews! It was a shock for us. I mean cinema was born in California, you need the sun, you work all day. But little by little, we were able to overcome these differences and focus on the things we have in common. We ended up as one crew working on the same movie.
There was a funny incident that shows you the difference between societies. We found this beautiful location with two adjacent houses [to play the homes for the conservative family and their progressive neighbors]I easily convinced one family to let us film there, but we were unable to contact the other owner. We kept asking our Norwegian partners to contact these people, to contact this guy, and they kept telling us, “Well, we left him a note.” We said, “Why don’t you go knock on the door and talk to him?” “This is not the way we do things,” they said.
Finally, two weeks before the shooting, they found him. “He seems to be a difficult person,” they told us. “He hasn’t spoken to his neighbors in about 10 years.”
In fact, he was a very nice and reasonable person and gave us permission to film. It turned out that he had not spoken to his neighbor in 10 years because he never wanted to bother him. No one started the conversation.
Eventually, after we shot there, they became very good friends. They needed someone from the outside with a different set of values to come in and show them that they had a lot in common. But there was little respect for privacy in the culture.
How optimistic are you that liberal humanism and dialogue are still possible in today’s society, especially in the age of social media, which plays a big role in the film?
I’m not the kind of optimistic person who says, “Hey, don’t worry.” I don’t think things are naturally moving in the right direction. We need to put in some effort to keep them in the right direction always.
If you watch what’s happening today, people are a little tired of democracy, because democracy is not something natural – it takes effort. Empathy takes effort. We are not born empathetic as children. We are so selfish. This comes with education.
We must make a generous effort to share our wealth with the poorest regions and communities if we want the world to move in the right direction. We can’t just advocate for liberal social issues for people who don’t have clean water. We need to get more involved. We have to understand that people with more resources gain more empathy. We can’t just vote for inclusion and empathy, we need to practice it. This requires effort.
It is not enough to believe that our values are good. We need to convince people that they are good, not just impose these values on them. Because if we do, they will surprise us every four years when they vote, by being baited via social media with all these irrational arguments of populist parties who have absolutely no interest in morality.
How do you balance tolerance in a liberal democracy with people who fundamentally reject democratic values?
That’s why I made the film in Norway, not in Belarus. There is no debate in Belarus. I come from a communist country. There was no discussion of your right to doubt what was imposed as truth in society.
But I hope that there is room in a democratic society to talk about your values and the best way to spread them. I have great respect for Norway and the Nordic countries. It is a very civilized society. They should be less strict in understanding that not everyone was so fortunate To reach this level of empathy.
You need to be a little patient, and you need to find ways to participate in the dialogue. It’s no use saying, “Trust me, this will be good for you.” You still need to convince people and invest in educating them, not impose your set of values, even if you are sure it is in their own interests.
I think this movie is about fundamentalism. If you have a fundamentalist mindset, there is not much difference between right-wing and left-wing fundamentalism. I think we have to meet somewhere in the middle and start accepting that some people will not have the same opinions and values that we do.
Were you concerned about this cash being made in Norway and not in your country?
I think they are smart enough to accept criticism, whereas a conservative society would not be smart enough to accept criticism. I was very happy to see that their reaction was to accept that perhaps they still had things to improve, which is what I would hope for from such a civilized society.
The danger increases when you try to bring this kind of delicate balance into a conservative society, because things are simpler there. You have no right to doubt things.
I hope to stir things up and create controversy. The film is just a catalyst for a conversation that I think we need to have in society, and I hope that many people will start from the film to fuel that conversation and this need to try to talk openly about things that haven’t been talked about openly for a long time.
I think cinema has a role in this too. I think films have become very political in the last 10 or 15 years, and they always emphasize the “correct values”. We need to balance this with films that allow us to express our doubts about today’s values. This is part of democracy and freedom that we need to keep alive as well.
How was Sebastian Stan involved in the film?
I met Sebastian about 10 years ago. He came to see me after the film was shown in New York graduation. I think this is a very funny moment, because his mother drove him 400 kilometers from upstate New York so we could meet.
Because he speaks Romanian – he was born in Romania – we connected very easily, and we decided that one day we would look for something that we could do together, but something that suited the kind of cinema I do and the kind of cinema I do.
For this movie, I said to him, “I’m sure you can play the dramatic part. I’ve seen that in your other movies, but you look a lot like a Hollywood star. But this guy isn’t like that.” [Stan’s MCU character] “Bucky.”
We needed some kind of physical change to make him this humble person who grew up in a society where he didn’t have any rights. I said: So if we make you bald? He wasn’t sure. So we put an ad on Instagram in Norway: “Looking for a Sebastian Stan fan who wants to shave as a surrogate.” We got one, flew it, ran the test and [Stan] I like how it looked.
The bald part helped him a lot, because he’s a method actor. He had to be close to the character, and this humility and this idea of not being proud of his appearance brought him closer to Mihai.
It also helped a lot that he and Renate had worked together before[V[onA different man (2024)]. We had little time to prepare. When they arrived on set, we needed to shoot immediately. It helped a lot that they knew each other beforehand. They already had chemistry.
Are you concerned that the film might be embraced by right-wing groups claiming victimhood?
definitely. I think it will happen, but it’s a risk that I think is worth taking in order to stand up for this right that we still have to question the values we believe in, and also talk about manipulation.
All the films I’ve done before have been manipulated for one reason or another. 4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days It has been considered either a film that defends or opposes the right to abortion Beyond the hills It was considered a fierce criticism of religion and an orthodox film.
I’ve gotten used to it, and I think we need to use our critical filters when we look at these topics. Expressing doubts about our liberal society does not mean for a moment that I am an apologist for a conservative society. This means that I trust progressive society more in its ability to accept self-criticism.
