// THE VERGE — MOBILE & WEB
The director of Fjord takes the ‘risky position’ of moderator
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With his new film about a Romanian family’s life in Norway, Cristian Mungiu wants you to consider the limits of your tolerance
With his new film about a Romanian family’s life in Norway, Cristian Mungiu wants you to consider the limits of your tolerance
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Cristian Mungiu’s sixth feature, Fjord, concerns a family on trial. They seem like good people, God-fearing. They’ve just moved from Romania to a small hamlet nestled in the fjords of rural Norway. There is Mamma (Renate Reinsve), Tata (a bald and bespectacled Sebastian Stan), and their passel of children. They are an openly religious and proselytizing family. The parents, unfashionably, believe in punitive consequences to actions. They would never be accused of gentle parenting. All ought to be well, only Norway in 2026 is extravagantly suspicious of the devout — their famous tolerance reserved for the secular.
Fjord starts quietly and builds subtly. We are with the family as they are introduced to their places of learning, employment, and worship. A second, Norwegian, family serves as their foil. Sort of. Questions arise, about what counts as discipline, what as punishment. To those wanting answers, objective analysis, which is to say a kind of measured purity, Mungiu says, come down to the mud with us! In the morally complex world of the movie, nothing is spared — a piano chord, a passing remark, hems of clothes — all are cast in a different light. We are all the more enriched for it.
The Verge spoke with Mungiu, who is himself Romanian, about how his early tenure in journalism informs his writing, what it was like living under Nicolae Ceaușescu’s dictatorial reign, Marxist literary theory, and the challenges and pleasures of thinking for oneself.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.