Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord, starring Renate Reinsve and Sebastian Stan as Romanian religious parents who relocate to a small Norwegian village and find themselves accused of child abuse, has won the Palme d’Or at the 79th Cannes Film Festival — the Romanian director’s English-language debut.
With the win, Mungiu joins Cannes’ elite two-timer club, following his 2007 victory with 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, his searing account of illegal abortion in Communist-era Romania.
For those keeping score, this marks the seventh year running that Neon has successfully picked the Palme winner. Tom Quinn’s indie outfit snatched up Fjord for domestic release ahead of this year’s festival.
Andreï Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur, a reworking of Chabrol’s The Unfaithful Wife as an immaculate domestic thriller set against contemporary Russia, took the runner-up prize, the Grand Prix.
Best directing honors were shared between Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, the co-directors of Spanish musical drama La Bola Negra, a García Lorca-inspired queer epic spanning eras with Penélope Cruz and Glenn Close, and Paweł Pawlikowski for Fatherland, a chilly, grief-laden film set in 1949 following novelist Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) and his daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller) returning to a fractured post-war Germany after years in American exile.
