The most provocative moment in “Fjord,” which won the highest prize at the Cannes Film Festival in May, comes as two teenagers are asked how often they pray.
The film’s premise is simple: A married couple, Mihai (Sebastian Stan) and Lisbet (Renate Reinsve), with five children and active involvement in an evangelical church relocate from Romania to the broadly secular Norway.
After a teacher at school notices marks on the family’s eldest daughter, she’s brought in, along with her brother, for interviews with child protection services. The questions grow more personal, before Elia is asked if she and her siblings are ever physically punished for not completing daily prayers.
“Define physical,” she responds.
When questioned by police, Mihai admits that he occasionally administers “a slap to the butt” as punishment, but he denies that he’s abusive. The children are immediately placed in foster families, and “Fjord” follows the parents as they attempt to get their children back — with the help of a pressure campaign involving the Romanian government and conservative Christians who see the family as victims of religious discrimination.
Filmmaker Cristian Mungiu welcomes all interpretations of his controversial movie, but a question remains front and center: How much control should parents have over their children’s upbringing? “Fjord” arrives in theaters as this decades-long debate continues to rage in the United States at school board meetings, in courtrooms and over dining room tables.
“We live in a world in which parents do believe that they have all the right in the world to influence the education of their children and to pass the right values to them,” Mungiu told The Washington Post on a video call. He added that the central friction in “Fjord” happens when a society believes that its values “are more important than your personal values.”
For decades, Republicans have introduced legislation to protect parents’ rights, but the cause has seen renewed attention in the 2020s with conservative activists pushing for more control over how race, gender and sexuality are taught in public-school classrooms. “I’m for parental rights all the way,” President Donald Trump said at a Moms for Liberty conference during his 2024 campaign. The next year, the Supreme Court ruled that parents can generally opt their children out of instruction that counters their religious upbringing.
One of Mungiu’s inspirations for the film was the real-life case of Marius and Ruth Bodnariu, which inspired protests when the couple’s children were placed in foster homes after Norway’s Barnevernet — which translates to Child Welfare Services — suspected corporal punishment. Similar cases across Europe also factored into Mungiu’s research for “Fjord.”
“When these kinds of cases become known, it’s because they trigger emotions,” said Hege Stein Helland, a political scientist who researches child protection at the University of Bergen in Norway. “It’s family broken apart: ‘They took the baby.’ Everyone can relate to this family element of it.”
Mungiu believes that the rising influence of the Christian right in the lead-up to Trump’s second term and the backlash in European states to these well-publicized cases involving child protection services have parallels with each other.
Some critics have argued that his sympathies lay with the family, but Mungiu believes “Fjord” doesn’t take sides. The intent, he said, was to depict the tension between a family with conservative values and a society with progressive ones.
“We are still free to take this moderate position as filmmakers, in which we present two different sets of values,” Mungiu said. “It doesn’t mean for a second that we’re encouraging the illiberal values that we are quoting.”
Marci Hamilton, the founder of Child USA, a think tank focused on children’s rights, is curious about how “Fjord” depicts its central immigrant family. But she worries about corporal punishment being used as a wedge issue to illustrate Mungiu’s concerns.
“If they’re trying to portray this as unfair that children are taken away from allegedly abusive parents, I have problems with that,” Hamilton said. “I don’t understand why you would choose that as a cultural difference.”
The conservative movement in the U.S. hasn’t recently focused on perceived overreach of Child Protective Services, as protesters do in “Fjord,” but some see the agency as an extension of a too-powerful government.
Michael Farris, the former CEO of the Alliance Defending Freedom and longtime home-schooling activist, wrote a book titled “Anonymous Tip” that followed a Christian single mom as her child is taken away by Child Protective Services. He’d like to see “Fjord,” in part because he believes that he has encountered similar cases in the U.S. as a lawyer.
“When there’s actual abuse and neglect going on, they need to intervene — and intervene effectively and consistently and fairly and for the kids’ good,” Farris said of CPS. “A lot of those things get lost in the wake of spinning their wheels on philosophical battles with people that they just don’t agree with.”
Mungiu points out that the rise of conservatives in elections from Europe to the U.S. could be a result of “the way in which these [progressive] values were implemented.” His previous film, “R.M.N.,” looked at a Romanian village that grows uncomfortable with the arrival of South Asian immigrants. For “Fjord,” he wanted to depict the inverse.
“We all agree that a lot of conservative society doesn’t really treat minorities well,” Mungiu said. “But I thought it’s interesting to conduct this investigation to this other world and to see what changes when the conservatives become a minority.”
The film’s stars reject the idea that “Fjord” supports the main characters’ conservative parenting views, which include a ban on nonreligious music and the belief that homosexuality is a sin.
“I find it almost laughable to label it a ‘MAGA film’ when it’s essentially about an immigrant family going to a different country and being torn apart,” Stan told USA Today. “We could change Norway for the United States, and Romania for Mexico, or any number of places where that’s happening.”
Charles Lundman, a 30-year-old student from Sweden who works in the film industry in Los Angeles, thinks that “Fjord” struck an important balance: It remained ambiguous, while offering empathy for the conservative Christian family at its center. This isn’t a subject he expected to see an actor like Stan — who’s best known as a Marvel star — to tackle.
“Maybe the conversations around this are limited to culture-war Twitch streamers and YouTube conservatives and liberals, like Hasan [Piker],” Lundman said. “But it would be awesome to see this theme and type of movie be able to exist more broadly.”
Criticism toward institutions, such as the Barnevernet, is important in a high-trust society such as Norway, according to Helland, the Norwegian political scientist. But she wonders whether a film featuring Norway’s biggest star (Reinsve) is the right forum for those concerns. “That is the eternal challenge for child protection — there will always be at least two sides of the story,” she said.
“There is one very vulnerable party, which is the family, the children, the parents. And then there are those with the power, [who] are also constrained by confidentiality. … It’s a very difficult area to penetrate.”
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