Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord Triumphs at the 2026 Palme d’Or

With Fjord’s Palme d’Or victory last Saturday, Romanian director Cristian Mungiu has joined a unique club of directors that have won the coveted award twice, which includes Ruben Östlund, Ken Loach and Michael Haneke. Whether he’s worthy of that vaunted position is a less interesting question at this stage, than how he’s managed to capture the zeitgeist again, as he did for 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, his first Palme winner. Whilst Fjord takes place at the very west of the European continent, in a remote Norwegian village, it speaks to social schisms the world over, questioning if reconciling different values and belief systems is truly possible.

Whilst some critics have questioned the sincerity of its deck-stacking premise, whereby the Norwegian child protection services have full authority to deprive the central Romanian family (with international stars Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve as the parents) of their five children, when they’re faced with an accusation of physical harm, it’s also just the turn needed to make the film work as a provocation, forcing the audience to think again about who they identify with. Whether its the ostensibly liberal Scandinavian welfare system, or even the evangelical Christian Right the family belong to.

Even a weaker edition of Cannes, as was the consensus of many attendees, is rewarding, and telling about the general direction of cinema. Only four years after the edition where Volodymyr Zelenskyy made a video-link appearance at the opening ceremony, and Russian journalists were rejected for press credentials, the Grand Prix was awarded to Andrey Zvyagintsev for Minotaur - at the simultaneous transmission in the Debussy of the award announcements, I could feel the tension from some in the audience, as he accepted the prize in his native language. Yet, the film impresses as a clear-eyed statement against the still-ongoing war waged by Putin, and the country’s perilous moral fall, as he allegorises its ruling class mentality with a tale of a wealthy businessman’s response to learning of his wife’s infidelity.

Elsewhere amongst the main prizes, Pawel Pawlikowski was bound to win something for his impressive, economical, and cool-tempered work in Fatherland, although his Best Director prize is the very same award he received for Cold War in 2018 - the jury missed a trick by not highlighting another aspect of the film’s artistry. Los Javis shared the Best Director prize ex acquo for The Black Ball, which symbolically showed the duo’s admission to this “high table” of auteur cinema, building on their success in the domestic TV world. Emmanuel Marre won Best Screenplay for A Man of His Time, which may’ve been better served with a Best Actor prize for its lead Swann Arlaud in his role as a pathetic Vichy collaborator, as opposed to the actors from Coward, one of the competition’s most underwhelming films. Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto were joint Best Actress winners for All of a Sudden; whilst their performances had a certain stiffness and lack of believability, they capably held the film’s foreground, an endearing testament to the intellectual exchanges that make up the richest adult friendships.

As the audiovisual industry copes with the arrival and acceptance of AI tools, and the revitalising Gen Z theatrical audience continues to grow, the next edition of Cannes should also very revealing, with it also potentially being General Delegate Thierry Frémaux’s last at the helm. And we have not heard the last of these films - as well as discoveries like La Gradiva and Everytime in the sidebars - as general audiences are set to discover and debate on them, and awards bodies start their voting.