Romanian Director Cristian Mungiu Wins His Second Palme d’Or at Cannes Film Festival for ‘Fjord’

Cristian Mungiu‘s complex moral drama “Fjord,” starring Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve, has won the Palme d’Or for best film at the Cannes Film Festival, making the Romanian writer-director the tenth filmmaker to win the coveted award twice — 19 years after his first victory for “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.” The film, about a Romanian family of Evangelical Christians mired in a child abuse case when they run afoul of the Norwegian social system, was among the more hotly debated titles in the Competition, with critics split on its merits and its sociopolitical allegiances — though evidently that very discussability united a jury headed by South Korean auteur Park Chan-wook.Mungiu was typically self-effacing as he accepted the Palme. “All awards are contextual,” he said. “The fact that you gave me this award, it’s wonderful for us and we feel very happy, but we need to wait 10, 20 years to watch these films again, and maybe then we’ll understand which of them were really good, and managed to survive the test of time.” In the post-ceremony jury press conference, meanwhile, director Park wittily dodged the question of what motivated the Palme choice: “To be completely honest, I didn’t want to award the Palme d’Or to any of the films, because it’s an award that I myself have never gotten. But I had no other choice.”