Problematic … Fjord, written and directed by Cristian Mungiu. Photograph: ©Tudor Panduru View image in fullscreen Problematic … Fjord, written and directed by Cristian Mungiu. Photograph: ©Tudor Panduru Film Dogmatic Nordic liberals v eastern family values: culture-clash drama Fjord touches nerves in Norway and Romania Cristian Mungiu’s Cannes winner echoes the news story of a Romanian couple whose children were taken by the Norwegian government. As it heads to London film festival, two writers explain how the film exposes real hypocrisies
Prefer the Guardian on Google ‘On paper, both countries agree that smacking your child is illegal’: Romanian journalist Andrei Popoviciu When Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord was shown in Romania as a one-day preview this June, the reception was extraordinary. Across 53 towns and 96 cinemas, the film reportedly pulled in over 40,000 viewers in a single night, a number arthouse cinema rarely sees in Romania. But the response here had little to do with cinema. It felt instead like a reopening of a familiar fault line about the clash of values within the EU itself.
Read more The film echoes events from 2015, when the five children of Marius and Ruth Bodnariu, a Pentecostal couple from Romania living in Norway – part of a Neo-Protestant minority long viewed with suspicion in Orthodox Romania – were removed from their home by Barnevernet, Norway’s child welfare authority, amid concerns over possible corporal punishment and religious indoctrination.
The fallout in Romania stretched on for months, with diplomatic friction, public demonstrations and constant media coverage. The children were eventually returned, and the Bodnarius later resettled in Romania. Mungiu doesn’t retell the story beat for beat, but Romanian viewers had no trouble recognising where it came from.
What divided viewers here was what the film did with a well-known story. Some have called it “dangerously confusing”, raising questions about abuse, integration and belief without taking a clear position. Others counter that its stance is embedded in form, in how sympathy is distributed, which characters get interiority and which are reduced to function.
To some, it’s a brave critique of dogmatic liberalism, while to others, it dilutes a clear moral boundary on corporal punishment while extending undue warmth to religious conservatism. At its most charged, the debate spills into a broader anxiety about whether the EU can sustain its own contradictions.
That tension surfaced again weeks later, when a viral video of a Romanian mother mistreating her daughter in public reignited the same split online (many defended her as exercising necessary discipline, others condemned her outright) suggesting attitudes here may be shifting, but unevenly.
It’s worth pausing on how narrow the legal gap between the two countries actually is, because the film’s reception treats it as a chasm. Romania criminalised corporal punishment in 2004, Norway in 1987. On paper, both already agree smacking your child is illegal, but the real distance is between law and belief.
A UN human rights body recently noted that despite the ban, Romania still needs to shift the mindset of parents who believe corporal punishment works better than the alternative. The Orthodox church, meanwhile, has never fully shed a folk theology in which strict discipline raises a righteous child, even as doctrine and law increasingly say otherwise.
What’s notable is how little agreement there is abou…