--- title: Cristian Mungiu's Palme d'Or Winner Fjord Opens in UK Cinemas Today description: Cristian Mungiu's Fjord, starring Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve, won the 2026 Palme d'Or and opens in UK and Irish cinemas on 13th November. author: Dr Marina Nani (Editor-in-Chief) date: 2026-11-13T14:00:00.063Z updated: 2026-11-13T14:00:00.069Z canonical: https://thequantumoflight.com/article/fjord-cristian-mungiu-palme-dor-uk-cinemas image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/pexels-21660243.webp categories: Art & Festivals content_type: Profile publication: The Quantum of Light schema_type: Article about: - type: Person name: Cristian Mungiu description: Romanian writer and director, born in Iași in 1968. He won the Palme d'Or in 2007 for 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and again in 2026 for Fjord, his first English-language film. jobTitle: Filmmaker --- Cristian Mungiu's Fjord opens in cinemas across the UK and Ireland today, Friday 13th November 2026, through Picturehouse Entertainment. In May the film won the Palme d'Or at the 79th Cannes Film Festival, where the jury was led by the Korean director Park Chan-wook and the award was handed over by Tilda Swinton. It was Mungiu's second Palme d'Or, nineteen years after his first, and it made him only the tenth filmmaker in the history of the festival to win its top prize twice. ## A Romanian Family in a Norwegian Village Fjord is Mungiu's sixth feature and his first in English. Sebastian Stan, the Romanian-born American actor, plays Mihai Gheorghiu, and Renate Reinsve, the Norwegian star of Sentimental Value, plays his wife, Lisbet. The couple are devout, they have five children, and they leave Bucharest to start again in Lisbet's remote home village on the Norwegian coast. Their children soon become close friends with the children of a local family. Then the Gheorghius are suspected of hurting their own children, and the school, the neighbours and the authorities close in. Mungiu shot the film in Norway in April and May 2025 with his regular cinematographer, Tudor Vladimir Panduru, and it runs for 146 minutes. He first met Stan about ten years ago, at a New York screening of his film Graduation, and he has joked that Fjord is the actor's first role in Romanian and his own first film in English. Critics have singled out the way the film refuses to hand you an easy answer about who is right. ## From Iași to Two Palmes d'Or Mungiu was born in Iași in 1968. He studied English literature, worked as a teacher and as a journalist, and only then went to film school in Bucharest. His second feature, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, the story of two students arranging an illegal abortion in the last years of Ceaușescu's Romania, won the Palme d'Or in 2007 and became a landmark of the Romanian New Wave. Beyond the Hills won the Cannes prizes for screenplay and for its two lead actresses in 2012, Graduation won him Best Director in 2016, and R.M.N. took him to a village in Transylvania in 2022. Fjord takes his camera abroad for the first time, but the subject is the one he has followed for two decades: ordinary people caught between what they believe and the institutions that judge them. Neon released the film in the United States on 9th October, and Mungiu marked the release with exhibitions in New York and Los Angeles of the photographs he took in Norway while preparing and shooting it. ## What Storytellers Can Learn From Fjord If you make films, write books or tell stories of any kind, Mungiu's method is worth studying. He builds tension from situations, not villains. Every character in Fjord has a reason for what they do, and you leave the cinema still turning over who was right. He also shows that a filmmaker can change language and country in his late fifties without losing the voice that made his name. ## Nineteen Years Between Two Palmes Nineteen years separate Mungiu's two Palmes d'Or. In between he kept making films about people pressed between conscience and rules, in Romanian, about Romania. Now the same eye has turned to a Norwegian fjord, and from today you can sit in a British cinema and decide for yourself what the Gheorghius did.