Fjord

Cristian Mungiu's Fjord won the Palme d'Or at the 79th Cannes Film Festival in May 2026, an edition in which the jury also awarded the film the FIPRESCI critics' prize, the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury, the François Chalais Prize and the Citizenship Prize — the most decorated single film at the festival that year. It is Mungiu's second Palme d'Or, twenty years after 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007), and his eighth feature.

The film is shot in English, Romanian, Norwegian and Swedish, and centres on a couple played by Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve. He is a Romanian doctor, she is a Norwegian woman returning to the small coastal town she left as a teenager. The early sections establish the rhythms of a new community: language lessons, weather, the unspoken pecking order of the village, the watching neighbours. The film's central question — what a society's professed tolerance actually contains when its boundaries are tested — is set up methodically and then taken at length, in the long-take, scene-as-argument register that has defined Mungiu's work since the New Romanian Wave of the mid-2000s. The supporting cast (Lisa Carlehed, Ellen Dorrit Petersen, Lisa Loven Kongsli) anchor the village ensemble that surrounds and eventually circles the Gheorghius.

Critical response was overwhelmingly positive, with some controversy attached: a faction of the Cannes press accused the film of moral pre-loading; the jury, presided over by Juliette Binoche, replied with the festival's top prize and most of its parallel awards. Subsequent reviews from Sight and Sound, The Guardian and Cahiers du cinéma placed it among Mungiu's strongest work, comparable to 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days in formal control and in its refusal to settle the central moral question on behalf of the viewer.