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Sebastian Stan stars in “Fjord” as a conservative Romanian father who faces religious discrimination after moving with his family to his wife’s (Renate Reinsve) progressive, remote Norwegian hometown. After Child Protective
Services receives a report of mild bruising on their two older kids, the couple is suspected of abuse and local authorities remove all five children from their home, throwing the family’s life into chaos as they become the subject of intense scrutiny.
The family legal drama, which received a 10-minute standing ovation and won Neon its seventh consecutive Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in May, screened at the New York Film Festival Sunday night. While introducing the film, Stan reflected on the questions of judgment and need for compassion at the heart of its story.
“This is my point of view, just about movies and the times that we’re currently finding ourselves in,” Stan told the audience at Alice Tully Hall. “We have to have the courage to recognize our own flaws, no matter what our belief systems are as human beings, and how that might affect our judgment of each other, and also how it pertains to raising the next future generation, our children, to whom we are ultimately in service. We have to remember that there’s more to it than just simply being right, and that doubt still serves a purpose and nuance is inherent to who we are.”
Stan joined “Fjord” director Cristian Mungiu for a Q&A after the screening. The pair first met in the very same room a decade ago, when Stan and his mother attended the New York Film Festival premiere of Mungiu’s 2016 film “Graduation,” which similarly centers on a Romanian father. Stan, who was born in Romania and immigrated to the United States at 12, recalled turning to his mother that night and telling her he wanted to return to Romania and work with Mungiu on a film in his native language.
“I turned to her and said, ‘I need to go back. I need to do a film in Romanian, and I want to work with him.’ So, I guess we made that happen,” Stan said. After the screening, the Marvel star quipped: “I was thinking about my mom out there going, ‘You finally played your grandfather!’”
Mungiu said the film’s story was inspired by real-life cases in Scandinavian countries, which he argued are sometimes unjustly celebrated as the happiest places to live in the world. The director said he hopes “Fjord” encourages audiences to have “a tolerance for people in the minority, even when [they] don’t agree with their opinion.”
“This film is not made only after investigating one case. I investigated several cases, and I noticed this pattern where families [were] coming from more conservative societies to Scandinavia,” Mungiu explained. “In most of these cases, you don’t really know what kind of violence it was, or if there was violence. Most of these decisions that people need to make involving children are based on assumptions, and when you base your decisions on assumptions, your own stereotypes about the values of the other can make you unbalanced in one direction.”
“Fjord” opens in theaters Oct. 9.
