When Sebastian Stan arrived in the United States as a boy, the message at home was simple: Don't tell anyone where you're from.
"It was communicated to me that it was best I didn't tell anybody where I was from. I didn't share what was different," Stan said during an Oct. 16 virtual press conference for "Fjord," Cristian Mungiu's Palme d'Or winner. "I just went along and tried to make friends, and I didn't make any enemies."
For years, he said, that silence turned into "this kind of weird shame about where I was from." Playing Mihai Gheorghiu, a devout Romanian father whose five children are taken by Norway's child protection services, became a way back. It's his first Romanian production.
"It's been a real dream of mine to try to kind of find a movie that, in a way, would allow me to reconnect to this part of my past," Stan said.
A family, a fjord and no easy answers
In "Fjord," Mihai and his Norwegian wife, Lisbet, played by Renate Reinsve, move their Pentecostal family to her remote hometown. When a teacher spots bruises on their daughter, the state steps in and removes all five children, including the baby. Neon opened the film Oct. 9, and it posted the weekend's strongest specialty debut, about $124,000 from four theaters in New York and Los Angeles.
Stan, who said he lived in Romania until he was 8, drew on a traditional upbringing and the Romanian men he grew up around. A man who "doesn't always tell you what he thinks and feels right away," he said, still carries deep feeling for his family.
His job, as he saw it, was to honor Mungiu's script without steering the audience, "so that you can make your own decisions about what kind of father he is, good or bad."
The work was physical, too. Mungiu shoots each scene in a single shot. "It looks natural, but it doesn't happen overnight. It's not accidental," Stan said. "It takes many, many takes, sometimes 30, 40 takes."
The actors learned to read their director's mood from his body language. When Mungiu stepped out from behind the monitor with his hands a certain way, Stan said, "we would go, I think he likes the take."
"Look at the hands now," Reinsve said, nodding at Mungiu during the press conference. "It's across."
Mungiu: 'I'm talking about you'
Mungiu said the story could not have been set in Romania. He calls "Fjord" a companion to his 2022 film "R.M.N.," which showed a conservative majority unable to absorb a minority. In "Fjord," he flips it: The majority is liberal and progressive, and the conservative family is the outsider.
Scandinavia carries a positive stereotype as one of the most educated and progressive places on Earth, he said, which made the conflict clearer to dramatize. He asked audiences to remember that families arriving from very different places carry values that "correspond to what was valid there 50 and 100 years ago" in the Nordic countries themselves.
"It's not fair to ask them to behave right away and to share the values of this progressive view of the world, because they are the result of a long process of getting there," Mungiu said.
He drew a hard line on abuse. "Once there is violence in those families and this violence is proven, there is no stop," he said. "You need to act." Beyond that, he argued for common sense over blanket rules, and persuasion over force. "Trying to force your values onto somebody else hasn't brought results," he said.
The director said he researched the real cases behind the film exhaustively, talking to parents, children, lawyers, child protection workers and journalists. He still couldn't say what happened inside that home. "I couldn't tell the truth," he said. "I didn't know what was happening in this family."
That uncertainty is the design. Mungiu said he is pushing back on a kind of cinema that takes the audience by the hand and sorts the good guys from the bad.
"The film doesn't need answers, but their life needs answers," he said. The hope, he added, is that "by the end of the screening, when you're in your car back home, you will realize that I'm talking about you."
Reinsve chose Lisbet
Reinsve said she and Mungiu first discussed two roles: Mia, from the liberal neighbor family, and Lisbet. She surprised herself by picking Lisbet, a quiet nurse whose life is "dictated by her relationship to God and her family."
"It was so grounding to be in that as an actor," she said.
She doesn't see a contradiction in a caregiver whose own mothering is questioned. Lisbet's strength, Reinsve said, is that she keeps her compassion even for the people confronting her, and turns it on herself long enough to change. She pointed to a scene where Lisbet holds boiling water and a baby at the same time. "She's actually protecting the baby and herself," she said.
Mungiu's no-manipulation approach took adjustment. "I think I got the hang of it like two weeks in," Reinsve said.
Building a marriage off the page
Stan and Reinsve, who worked together on "A Different Man," built the Gheorghiu marriage before cameras rolled. Mungiu handed them a detailed back story: how Mihai and Lisbet met, why they lived in Romania, why they had five children, what Mihai's father did for a living.
Stan took Reinsve to Romania, to Romanian restaurants and to a home party she called "one of the best parties I've been to." The two also attended a Pentecostal service.
In Norway, the cast lived inside the small radius seen on screen, eating breakfast, lunch and dinner with the child actors and walking to work together. They reached the set by boat, dodged rockfalls and lived without a grocery store. Reinsve took the cold Nordic lake dip.
They shot versions of scenes loud and quiet, with dialogue and without, so Mungiu could shape the relationship in the edit. When Reinsve started answering for both of them, Mungiu cut in: "This is the relationship, actually. She speaks on his behalf."
"Fjord" is in select theaters from Neon.
