'Fjord,' 2026 Palme d'Or: 'Cristian Mungiu lends cinematic prestige to the fight against political correctness'

Upon receiving his second Palme d'Or for Fjord, Cristian Mungiu was hailed as a great moralist of cinema, the author of a "plea against all forms of fundamentalism," in his own words. Yet, at the Cannes Film Festival, he offered a less consensual interpretation of his film. According to him, there are too many "politically correct" films these days, and art has lost the freedom to challenge prevailing ideology – a pressure he likened to the communist ideology that "knew better than the citizens." He specified that his film's subject is "left-wing fundamentalism." One must choose between the humanist plea and the attack on political correctness, or else admit that ambiguity is his chosen method.

This method, in fact, forms a system. In Beyond the Hills (2012), Mungiu drew from the true story of a young novice who died in 2005 during an exorcism in a Tanacu monastery in Romania, probing religious fanaticism. In R.M.N. (2022), he referenced the Ditrau affair, in which a village in Transylvania turned against Sri Lankan workers, exploring the roots of everyday xenophobia. Fjord revisits the Bodnariu case, involving a Romanian-Norwegian Evangelical family living in Norway whose five children were placed in the care of the Norwegian child welfare services, known as Barnevernet, in 2015. The film is told through the eyes of a mixed couple – a Romanian father and a Norwegian mother – whose children are taken away after a report of suspected abuse. This case proved foundational. It led to the creation of the Coalition for the Family and, subsequently, the 2018 referendum on the constitutional definition of family (aimed at maintaining the ban on same-sex marriage), which all parliamentary parties supported after a fiercely contested media campaign. Only low turnout caused it to fail. It marked, in Romania, the first major protest against "European values," from which the far-right Alliance for the Union of Romanians emerged.

Each time, the filmmaker's approach is the same: take an issue saturated with political meaning and stubbornly refuse to deliver the moral verdict that each side expects. In the Bodnariu case, although pro-Russian and ultraconservative propaganda seized on the issue, the grievance had a genuine core. By the end of 2024, Norway held the record for the most convictions handed down by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg regarding child protection: 23 violations of Article 8, involving insufficiently justified placements and family separations, as well as flawed procedures. It was upon this kernel of truth that disinformation flourished, such as when, in February 2015, Czech President Milos Zeman compared Norwegian child placement policy to Lebensborn, the eugenics program implemented by the Third Reich. Nothing facilitates falsification better than an authentic grievance.

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