The director of Fjord takes the ‘risky position’ of moderator

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.

I’d like to start with you at Cannes, where you said the question that Fjord raises is: Are there good minorities and bad minorities? I wonder if this question has changed for you since.

Not so much. I think that as much as we need to understand that there are good values in society, like tolerance for all the other minorities and inclusion of those who are different than us, we should always focus on this idea that sometimes even if there are minorities with whom we don’t share the same values, we need to be tolerant to those as well. If not, what makes us believe that we have a more liberal, progressive view on the world?

Of course, there is a limit. We all need to condemn violence, and we all need to be on the same side of helping people out.

But whenever we talk about, for example, religious beliefs, even if we are people who don’t share such beliefs, it’s good to be tolerant with them, if they want to share different views. You need to let them be.

“Even if there are minorities with whom we don’t share the same values, we need to be tolerant to those as well.”

There are so many people next to us who share a lot of irrational beliefs, from reading the horoscope to believing in alternative medicine. We let them be. Why would we condemn people for being religious? It’s good to try to convince them that actually it’s good to see that your beliefs are based on something rational, because eventually, we all influence the lives of others, and it’s good to make choices based on rational things. But you need to advance little by little, step by step. I don’t believe in this way of imposing views on others and making rules for others to change what they think. If you do that, you will only radicalize people.

You said you kept chancing upon articles about immigrant families in Nordic countries. Is reading the news part of your practice? Otherwise, where have your ideas come from?

I read a lot of news every day, and I keep a lot of these articles in special folders under different themes. And it took years before I decided to make a film based on the ideas in these articles, because in the beginning they are very spectacular. They are just informing us about something spectacular that has happened. While for me, the film should be something deeper, more profound, in the sense that I’m trying to figure out why those things have happened and what do they tell us about the world around us?

I try to avoid the sensational part of it and to try to dig down, and to understand what is it that it could tell you about your own life, and this is what I did for the original story as well. I needed some eight years from the moment when I read about it to the moment when I decided to make a film out of it.

Tell me more about your excavation process. Can you walk us through what is actually happening in those eight years? And specifically, can you tell us about the moment in the process when you go from research to fiction? What does that leap look like, or maybe it’s seamless?

It’s fair to say that I haven’t used all these 10 years to investigate. But I was aware all the time that this exists. For example, I decided to talk to this family who was involved in the most prominent case, in the most spoken-about case, from three years ago. I talked to them. I talked to their children. I went to Norway. I met their relatives. I went to see the house where everything happened. I took advantage in that moment to investigate more, and I met everybody that I could who was involved in that case. And people who were willing to talk to me. I talked to lawyers. I talked to all the press that covered the case. I talked to the translator they were having when talking to the police. I talked to the Barnevernet [Norwegian child welfare agency]. I talked to the NGOs who were involved a lot in such cases. Later on, I was a witness to the trials they were having on children issues. So I did my best to find all the points of view of people involved, not only in that case but in other cases.

And finally, I crafted the screenplay based a lot on the arguments that I was recording. I didn’t have to invent much. I just needed to organize the material, but I didn’t need to build a lot on what are the arguments of each of these two sides.

The fictional part of the film comes a lot from this second family, which is fully fictional, and that gave me the possibility of following the film from the point of view of the adults. I needed to be with the family, but I wanted to balance this point of view of the family with the point of view of another family with children and sharing the values of the society in which they live, a family with whom they need to communicate with because they are secluded in this fjord at the end of the world, and it was important for me to see how these values collide, and what changes in this process of being forced to communicate with others.

Tell us about your time as a reporter, early in your career. How did you decide to turn to film?

I started working in the press in 1987, and also this was a part of me getting closer to what I wanted to do. I wished that I could become a storyteller, and I wished already at that age — I was 19 — that I could become a filmmaker. Back then, becoming a student at the film school during communist times wasn’t really a fair process, so it wasn’t for me. So I was starting to get closer to becoming a writer. This is what I thought I could do. I started writing. And then I got to this newspaper, and I started practicing my writing and taking pictures. Two activities which were as close as I could to becoming a filmmaker without being able to become one on the spot. A lot of my style of writing screenplays today is still based on that period in which I learned how to write a piece of news.

But happily, you know, the wall fell. Communism collapsed. It was very passionate to be in the press for a while because people were hungry for what they were calling “truth” after such a long period in which we didn’t have a free press.

My style of writing was shaped in that period. I am not bringing, when I describe things, my own point of view. I’m describing an external situation, the way in which these things manifest, but I don’t draw the conclusion. I depict a situation, and I encourage you to use your critical spirit to understand the way it manifests. I am encouraging you also to take on this responsibility as a spectator, in which I’m not guiding you through the story. You have your freedom of interpreting based on facts, and making sure you analyze the facts. If you’re just analyzing what the characters say, you might be very easily manipulated. Manipulated, because, as you know, in cinema, characters lie, and are as manipulative as people are in real lives.

So it’s not that you wanted to be a filmmaker as such, but that you wanted to be a storyteller, and you found film?

I wanted to be a storyteller, and I thought that I’m going to be a writer. Then I was undergoing this period in my life in which I was watching a lot of films, very popular films.

Also being influenced by the Romanian films that I could watch in the period, which were very strange. Maybe it was, in part, the censorship, but probably it was also that the people that were encouraged to make films were not very talented. But they seemed to be made with people looking like us, and apparently using the same language as us, but actually nothing like that ever happened in reality. They were psychologically so unbelievable, and the dialogue was also a message that somebody wrote in the right order grammatically, and it was pure propaganda.

So, we started developing this idea that it shouldn’t be this complicated to make films. You just need to co-opt reality.

I want to tell you something funny about the message that I got today. Following a lot of these cases in the Nordic countries and talking to so many people, I became some sort of an expert.

I got a message this morning from a half-German, half-Norwegian family saying, Help. Help us. Nothing has changed. I’m trying to bring this forward. This is a topic about which we all need to have an opinion. But I’m not this superhero that can solve the situation.

It’s important to make this clear that the film is not just about Romania and Norway and the Barnevernet. The film is about what happens in the States too, for example. I think that this polarization of people needs to have an answer because we can’t continue living in these bubbles. This degree of hatred and aggression, which might end up badly, and very violent.

What do you do when people call you for help?

They text, and I’m answering back.

I started this promotional tour in Norway, and I met a lot of people from both sides talking to me. We ran across this very difficult confession of a spectator, this lady who was crying, telling us that she was experiencing these cases with such emotion that finally she decided, for fear of having her children taken away by the authorities, she decided to rather have an abortion.

We also met people telling us that they are 100 percent behind the point of view of the protection in the film, because if they were in the situation of having their children taken in a conservative society, nobody would care for them. I think this shows that people rather tend to imagine that the wrong and radical way of seeing the society can be compensated by another wrong and radical way, and this shouldn’t be the answer. The answer should be more attempts at integration, trying to be more empathic and more open to dialogue, if we wish to give a good example to the part of the society who think they can’t escape this idea that they already know the truth and there’s no way out.

In the court scene, Sebastian Stan’s character gestures at the ways in which liberal societies privilege physical harm over emotional or verbal harm. There is, of course, no such thing as a view from nowhere. I know you said your opinion doesn’t matter, but I would still like to know how you relate or do not relate to this argument.

Of course, we need to make this clear. As soon as there is proven violence in a family, we all need to act as soon as we can and save them. Be it children or women. Of course, we need to act.

But the film talks about the fact that in most cases, you are supposed to make a choice, not knowing what happened in the family. You are just having assumptions in most of these cases, and this is why Fjord is crafted as such.

After investigating for two years and talking to all the parties involved, I can’t tell if this real family, which was involved in the real case, was violent or not. I don’t know. I’m not saying that they were not. I don’t know, because even if I talk to them and to their children... But I noticed that when people are making choices in Norway, for example, or us in society in general, we tend to be biased by our own stereotypes about the situation, and it’s very difficult to position yourself in an objective point of view. This doesn’t really exist.

“I was curious enough to see what happens in liberal, progressive societies when the conservatives all of a sudden become a minority. ”

So you need to be aware that you’re biased, that you are seeing the situation from your perspective, and when you’re mentioning that you’re doing whatever is best for the benefit of the children, actually you tend to believe that your solution is for the best, while the others will believe the same if they act on their opinions.

And of course, you know, we need to make sure that there is enough freedom accepted by everybody into our societies, so that minorities have the right to be who they want to be.

But after making a film that was speaking a lot about how minorities are being discriminated in conservative society, I was curious enough to see what happens in liberal, progressive societies when the conservatives all of a sudden become a minority. Wouldn’t you expect that they are treated with more empathy for not sharing the same values with the majority? Well, actually, they are not. The fact that you belong to the majority tends to be more important to you than the values that belong to your ideology.

Literary theorist Terry Eagleton has a quote that goes, “Ideology is like bad breath. We only recognize it in other people.”

I understand precise choreography is part of your process. You have talked about how you also try your best to avoid cutting because that is an interpretation. Does that mean the point of art is verisimilitude, capturing reality? And if not that, what are movies for? Why do you make movies?

I believe in diversity in filmmaking, and I think that making entertainment is also a valid way of making films, but it shouldn’t be the only way. The films that I try to make are films that try to make people think a little bit more, and to make them aware of the world which exists next to theirs. I’m using this as a tool to make you aware that you should be very careful of what happens next to you.

There isn’t anything like an objective point of view, but the best I could do is not to be manipulative with my style. I’m not making a film biased by one of these points of view. I’m taking this risky position of a moderator, bringing two sets of values in front of you so that you can double check your values and to remember when was the last time when you doubted that you are on the good side of things? Everybody else is so convinced that they are as right as you, but you know the first step into entering some sort of a dialogue is listening to others.

Fjord was released in select US theaters October 9th, with a wide release on October 23rd.

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