Cannes Palme d’Or winner Cristian Mungiu is in post-production on his first English-language feature, Fjord, a family drama led by Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve that he hopes to unveil at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival.
Speaking on the red carpet at the Marrakech Film Festival, Mungiu said, “I’m in post-production now. We shot this year in April and May in Norway, mostly,” and praised Stan and Reinsve as actors who have had “a lovely year.” He shared the update in an interview cited by Deadline and syndication outlets.
Fjord follows a mixed Romanian-Norwegian couple who relocate with their children to the remote coastal village where the wife grew up. Their attempt at a fresh start sours after clashes with another couple in the community and growing scrutiny of the newcomers’ behaviour, turning the village into a pressure cooker for two neighbouring families.
Mungiu shot the film over about 40 days around Ålesund in Norway’s Møre og Romsdal region, leaning on the stark landscape of the fjords rather than his usual Romanian locations. The film is structured as a Romanian-French-Norwegian-Danish-Finnish-Swedish co-production, with Paris-based sales outfit Goodfellas handling worldwide rights and having launched pre-sales at the European Film Market earlier this year.
Neon has acquired distribution rights for North America, the U.K., Australia and New Zealand, positioning Fjord for a coordinated festival-and-theatrical rollout once Cannes makes its 2026 selections. The company boarded the project during the 2025 Cannes market, backing the film early while it was still in production.
The project extends a Cannes-heavy career. Mungiu has competed at the festival four times, winning the Palme d’Or in 2007 for 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Best Screenplay for Beyond the Hills in 2012, and Best Director for Graduation in 2016, before returning with R.M.N. in 2022.
His leads arrive with their own recent heat. Stan earned his first Oscar nomination this year for playing a young Donald Trump in The Apprentice, while Reinsve won Best Actress at Cannes in 2021 for The Worst Person in the World and has since become a regular presence on the European awards circuit.
In a separate interview about the Norway shoot, Mungiu said working with Stan and Reinsve felt “no different” from his Romanian casts, stressing that both actors lived and rehearsed with the ensemble and that Stan arrived without an entourage or special on-set treatment. The bigger adjustment, he said, came in reconciling Romania’s 12-hour shooting days with Norway’s shorter, union-driven schedule.
With editing now underway, Fjord enters the home stretch backed by established European partners and a North American distributor known for championing Cannes titles, setting up one of the most closely watched festival bids of 2026 for both Mungiu and his high-profile cast.
