The Tamesis
Romanian director Cristian Mungiu won the Palme d’Or in 2007 for his harrowing abortion drama 4 months, 3 weeks, 2 days. Now, he’s back with another admittedly tough but pressing sit-down: fjordA story about immigration, hostility and cultural clashes in remote Norway, starring Oscar nominee Sebastian Stan and sentimental valueRenate Rainsway. Fascinating, richly detailed, nuanced, and tricky, this is easily the best film I saw at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival.
At its core was the Georgiou family: Mihai, a Romanian (Stein himself was born in Romania); his wife, Lisbeth (Reinsve), a Norwegian; and their five children. After the death of Mihai’s mother, they decided to move from Mihai’s hometown to Lisbet’s hometown to be closer to her family. Mongi and his talented cinematographer Tudor Vladimir Panduru invite us into a fairy tale with precise and fantastic framing of the mountains, lakes and chocolate box houses of this new home; Georgius’s neighbors are warm and generous, the children begin to make friends at school and they seem to have found their own community.
But tensions simmer beneath the surface. Lisbet was a nurse who cared for the bodies of the recently deceased. She was told to avoid bringing religion into the workplace, but as a devout Christian, she found herself reaching out to a grieving woman, offering her phone number, a Bible, and a space in the church if she needed it. Meanwhile, Mihai, an aerospace engineer who had relocated to work in IT, surprised his atheist colleagues by playing hymns on the piano. Their children are prayed for and disciplined, although new friend and classmate Noura (Henrik Lund Olsen) begins to stir rebellious tendencies in the two older children, Elia (Vanessa Saban) and Emmanuel (Jonathan Cyprian Brezu). The more the Norwegians learned about the Georgius family, the angrier they became at their exoticism.
One day, Arya came to school with a red bruise on her face. Given what she knew about her parents, her teachers believed they had beaten her. When she was asked if her parents ever got into physical fights with her, she admitted that, yes, they sometimes spanked her if she misbehaved.
Amid the eerie calm, those in charge decided without hesitation to involve Child Protective Services. A policeman came and told Mihai how he punished his children. And, in one of the most shocking, painful, yet still eerily calming scenes in the film, Lisbeth is told that her children were being taken away from her for their safety—not just Elia, but all five, including the one she was still breastfeeding. Reinsf’s face turned from confusion to shocked fear, and a Norwegian flag fluttered in the wind outside the window behind her. She reminded that this is how the laws regarding child safety in her home country work.
The scene where she is separated from her child is another masterclass: Mihály watches through a window, perfectly depicting Lisbeth putting the child into the car and staggering back as the car drives away. You can’t see Stan or Reinsoff’s faces, but every inch of their body language conveys their utter heartbreak.
So, the battle begins. Lisbeth attended parenting classes and Mihai attended anger management classes, and they visited the children, who are now placed in different foster homes in the area. They also just want to go home, but there must be a full investigation and trial. When Lisbeth asked how to breastfeed the child, she was told that the powers that be had to contact the “mother,” the child’s new adoptive mother.
