There’s a particular kind of recognition that hits differently than empathy. Empathy is watching something painful happen to someone else and feeling it alongside them. Recognition is watching it happen and remembering it happening to you.
Fjord, Cristian Mungiu’s Palme d’Or winner at Cannes this year, follows a Romanian immigrant family living in Norway whose children are removed by authorities after bruises are found at school. What follows is a story about systems, about language, about the distance between cultural context and institutional assumption. It is, at its core, a story about injustice.
I am not reviewing this film from a neutral position, and I won’t pretend otherwise. I grew up as a first-generation immigrant. The kid in the ESL class, raised in one culture inside the structure of another that expected assimilation without offering understanding. The food we ate was different. The way we related to each other was different. The ideas of respect and modesty and discipline were different. None of that was met with curiosity. It was met with correction.
So when I watched this family, a family that I read as strict but loving, held to the standards of a country that didn’t understand where they came from and didn’t care to find out, it didn’t land as a hypothetical. It landed as memory.
The signals of otherness in Fjord begin long before the system gets involved.
When the children first arrive at school, the headmaster, who is also their neighbour, makes a comment about there being “no Dracula here” in Norway. It’s delivered lightly. Almost a joke. But the family is Romanian. Transylvania is Romanian. And reducing an entire country and its people to a pop culture monster, even casually, even with a smile, tells you exactly how this family is being seen. Not as people with a history and a homeland, but as a stereotype to be gently corrected out of them.
Then there is the name. The family’s surname, Gheorghiu, is mispronounced repeatedly throughout the film, corrected by family members more than once. It’s a small thing. Easy to overlook if you’ve never experienced it. But I have spent my entire life correcting people on how to say my name. I know what that does. Every correction is a reminder that you are not the default. That your existence in this place requires a kind of effort from the people around you, and that they experience that effort as an inconvenience rather than a basic act of respect.
These are not dramatic moments. They are not meant to be. They are the soil the rest of the film grows in. The joke. The mispronunciation. And then, eventually, the removal of five children from their home. The scale changes. The root does not.
What Fjord captures with devastating precision is the machinery of assumption. The way a system built to protect children can, when it encounters a family it doesn’t recognize, become the thing those children need protection from. Bruises are found. Conversations are had with children who are fluent in Romanian, possibly conversational in English, and struggling in Norwegian. And in that gap between languages, meaning gets lost. Not because the children are lying, but because the terminology, the phrasing, the cultural framework behind the words doesn’t translate cleanly.
Anyone who has spoken more than one language knows this. The gendered articles, the false cognates, the phrases that carry weight in one tongue and land flat or wrong in another. But the system doesn’t account for that. It takes answers at face value, as though these children were native speakers of the language being used to build a case against their parents. It’s a classic method of interrogation, one designed to benefit the interrogator.
We’ve seen this before. The Central Park Five. Brendan Dassey. The West Memphis Three. Coerced confessions across hundreds of cases in the American system alone.
Just sign the statement. Just say you were there. It doesn’t mean you did anything. Until it does. Until it’s used to dismantle your family, your freedom, your life.
The parents in Fjord are placed in an impossible position: forced to defend things that should not require defence. The way they raise their children. The beliefs that shape their household. The fact that discipline exists within their family at all.
I am a parent. I have a fourteen-year-old. Children get bruises from everything, from play, from carelessness, from being small humans who don’t yet understand danger. And yes, you smack a hand reaching for a hot stove. You pull a toddler back from a ledge with more force than grace. That isn’t abuse. That’s instinct. That’s protection.
But the system doesn’t start from that assumption. It starts from suspicion. And when you are already culturally other, when your food is wrong, your language is wrong, your faith is wrong, your parenting is wrong, you are working from a deficit before you open your mouth. So of course the answers sound defensive. Wouldn’t yours? If someone questioned the most fundamental tenets of who you are, as a parent, as a family, as a person of faith, you would not respond with measured calm. You would respond like someone under attack. Because you are under attack. And it would take an almost inhuman level of grace to receive that kind of intrusion as genuine concern rather than what it feels like, which is an assault on everything you are.
That’s not dysfunction. That’s what it means to have beliefs and to feel profoundly, systemically misunderstood.
Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve deliver a masterclass in restraint. Their performances as Mihai and Lisbet don’t reach for the viewer’s sympathy. They don’t perform anguish for the camera. When the tension hits, they don’t adjust to what the Norwegian system or society expects of them. If anything, they become more themselves. More authentic. Their faith, and their commitment to it, gives them a foundation that holds even as everything around them fractures. Surely, surely, things will work out in the end. God willing.
They remain stoic. United. Appalled at the sheer magnitude of the misunderstanding that has been inflicted on them and their children. They can’t lash out. They can’t rage. It’s another example of being held to expectations and accountability within a system that holds no space for you, at the mercy of an institution that has already decided your beliefs are inferior. No warning. No preamble. A single assessment that changes the entire course of a family’s future.
Mungiu — whose 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days remains one of the defining films of the Romanian New Wave — is known for his depth of research and his particular, uncompromising style. Both are on full display here. The character development is unflinchingly realistic, morally complex, and deliberately paced. Long takes and wide shots force the viewer to observe without the comfort of an ambient score guiding their emotions. There is no hand-holding. You sit with what you see, and you decide what it means to you.
Mungiu’s work is famous for confronting the viewer with choice. I do not see this film as ambiguous, despite plenty of other reviews claiming otherwise. What is ambiguous is the viewer’s own sense of moral character. Where they sit on the spectrum. What they see as acceptable. What they are willing to tolerate in a family that doesn’t look like theirs.
I am not religious. I am not conservative. I am the head of a family household where there are two mothers. And none of that changes where I stand on this.
Evelyn Beatrice Hall, in her 1906 biography The Friends of Voltaire, said it best:
I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
If watching Fjord does not move the needle on that sentiment for you, then you have missed the entire point of the film.
I have seen Fjord twice now, the first public screening at the Sydney Film Festival and a second sitting the following day. My opinion didn’t change. It got deeper. More nuanced. The things you catch on a rewatch, when the initial impact has settled and the architecture becomes visible, only reinforced what I felt the first time.
Fjord is not a film that asks whether you agree with how this family lives. It asks whether you believe a system should be allowed to destroy them for it.
The answer should not require deliberation.