Mungiu again: 'Fjord' wins the Palme d'Or in Cannes

Romanian director Cristian Mungiu won his second career Palme d’Or on May 24 at the 78th Cannes Film Festival with the drama “Fjord”, Screen Daily and IndieWire report from the closing ceremony. This marks the seventh consecutive Palme d’Or for the American distributor Neon.

“Fjord” is a drama about a Romanian family in Norway that becomes the target of social services, with lead roles played by Oscar nominee Renate Reinsve and the American actor of Romanian descent Sebastian Stan. After the Cannes premiere, the film drew a 10-minute audience ovation, one of the longest reactions of this year’s program, RogerEbert.com reports from the venue.

This is the second Palme d’Or for Mungiu; the first came in 2007 for the film “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days”, which was the first Palme d’Or in history for Romanian cinema. The director, born April 27, 1968, in Iasi, has previously won Cannes awards for screenplay (“Beyond the Hills”, 2012) and directing (“Graduation”, 2016).

In the remaining main categories, the Grand Prix went to “Minotaur”, “The Black Ball” won Best Director, while “Fatherland” took the acting prize. According to Deadline, this year’s festival featured a notably strong Romanian and Nordic lineup, including several co-productions debuting in Cannes for the first time.

In his closing ceremony speech, cited by Celluloid Junkie, Mungiu thanked his sister Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, a political analyst, and the crew that shot the film in Norway over 2024 and 2025. European distribution of “Fjord” begins in the autumn, with the Serbian premiere scheduled for the “Auteur” festival in Belgrade, per a distributor’s statement.

Renate Reinsve, the Norwegian actress who won the 2021 Cannes Best Actress prize for “The Worst Person in the World”, further cements her position as one of the most influential European actresses of the mid-career generation with “Fjord”. Sebastian Stan, the American actor of Romanian origin born in Constanta, widely known for his roles in Marvel films and his recent success in “The Apprentice”, appears for the first time entirely in Romanian in this production.

The theme of Norwegian social services, around which “Fjord” is built, is part of a decade-long narrative in which Romanian and Eastern European families have felt vulnerable to the Nordic model of child welfare, the subject of several documentaries in recent years. According to a pre-festival interview with IndieWire, Mungiu drew inspiration for the screenplay from a real 2018 case that triggered a strong public reaction in the Romanian media.

Neon, the distributor that, with “Fjord”, has won its seventh straight Palme d’Or, has for years been described as one of the most successful independent distributors in festival history, with a streak of major festival wins that includes Bong Joon-ho’s “Parasite”, Justine Triet’s “Anatomy of a Fall” and other films with strong international signatures.