A still from ‘Fjord’
| Photo Credit: Neon
Neon has released the first trailer for Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord, the Romanian filmmaker’s latest drama starring Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve. The film won the Palme d’Or at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, giving Mungiu his second top prize at Cannes after 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days won in 2007.
Stan plays Mihai Gheorghiu, a Romanian man who moves from Bucharest to a remote Norwegian coastal town with his Norwegian wife Lisbet, played by Reinsve, and their five children. The family is deeply religious, and their approach to raising their children quickly puts them at odds with the secular environment around them. When teachers discover unexplained bruises on one of the children, Norwegian child protection services begin investigating the family.
Fjord draws on several real child-welfare cases in Norway, including the highly publicised case of a Romanian-Norwegian family whose children were taken into state care. Mungiu uses the situation to examine the collision between a family’s religious and cultural values and the expectations of the society in which they have settled.
The film marks Mungiu’s first feature made outside Romania and his first primarily English-language production. The director previously won the Palme d’Or for 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days in 2007, making Fjord his second Cannes triumph nearly two decades later. He is now among the small group of filmmakers to have won the festival’s top prize twice.
The film also reunites Stan and Reinsve after Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man, which premiered at Sundance in 2024 and earned Stan the Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance at the Berlin International Film Festival. Stan, who was born in Romania, has said that working with Mungiu gave him the opportunity to perform in Romanian while telling a story rooted in his country of birth.
Stan undergoes another significant physical transformation for the role, appearing bald and wearing glasses as the middle-aged Mihai. Reinsve plays Lisbet as a mother caught between her husband’s convictions, her children and the institutions of her native country. The supporting cast includes Lisa Carlehed, Henrikke Lund-Olsen, Ellen Dorrit Petersen, Lisa Loven Kongsli and Markus Tønseth.
Fjord is scheduled to open in U.S theatres on October 9, 2026, with Indian distribution yet to be announced.
Published – August 28, 2026 03:24 pm IST
