Cannes Palme d’Or winner Cristian Mungiu has set his sights on a return to the festival in 2026 with his debut English-language film Fjord starring Sebastian Stan (The Apprentice) and Renate Reinsve (Sentimental Value).
The co-stars play a mixed Romanian and Norwegian couple who move to the fjord village where the wife was born with their children. Their planned new life does not go to plan when they come up against a couple with a very different outlook on life.
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“I’m in post-production now. We shot this year in April and May in Norway mostly. We are very happy that we happen to have a couple of actors in the film that have had a lovely year, Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve,” the Romanian director told Deadline on the red carpet at the Marrakech Film Festival.
“I couldn’t have met them in a better circumstance for their careers, and I liked a lot working with them, and I hope that everybody will enjoy the way they put together this delicate and intimate story,” he added.
The film is Mungiu’s first film in three years after 2022 drama R.M.N. The director has competed in Cannes four times, winning the Palme d’Or for 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days in 2007, Best Screenplay for Beyond The Hills in 2012 and Best Director for Graduation in 2016.
His new film vicariously reconnects Stan with Romania, where he was born and raised until the age of eight, before moving to the U.S. after a brief time in Austria.
“I started talking to Sebastian some eight years ago about doing a project together, and it’s very funny that this project that we’ve done now, it’s his first in Romanian, but my first in English,” said Mungiu.
“It’s half a joke, but it’s true, he speaks a little bit of Romanian in the film, but he also speaks a lot of English, and it’s mostly a mixture of English and Norwegian with a little spice of Romanian every now and then.”
Mungiu is at the Marrakech Film Festival this year as the patron of its Atlas Workshops project incubator focused on future films from the Middle East and Africa.
The lineup features in-development projects by Suha Arraf, Scandar Copti, Mounia Akl, Amjad Al Rasheed as well as a handful of films expected to debut on the festival circuit in the coming year including Laïla Marrakchi’s Las Más Dulce, Rami Kodeih’s Wolves and Asmae El Moudir’s documentary Don’t Let The Sun Go Up On Me.
Mungiu said the Atlas Workshops was an extension of his work back in Romania helping emerging directors.
“You can meet a lot of fresh ideas about cinema, and it’s very important that cinema is always refreshed by people who do not want to imitate the model that they have seen in others, but to try to find their own voice and to impose their own voice in the world of festivals to start with.”
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