Culture Clash

Fjord (2026) - Mungiu In Christian Mungiu's films, Romania is a country full of contradictions where the past and the present precariously co-exist side by side. It's that friction of old and new, tradition and modern world, belief and secular he pits against each other that works so perfectly as tension filled dramas - 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Beyond the Hills, Graduation. He does it again with Fjord, his first film not set in Romania, with two international stars - Sebastian Stan (Captain America: Winter Soldier, Apprentice) and Renate Reinsve (Sentimental Value, Backrooms) playing a cross-national Romanian Evangelical Christian couple, who just moved from Romania to Norway with their 5 kids.

Mihai Gheorghiu (Stan)'s large Romanian family moves into a small close-knit Norwegian town after he gets recruited as an IT support for the town's school. His parents have passed on, Lisbet (Reinsve)'s parents are close by as a support system, their church congregations is in town, and they want their children to have a better future, so their move was a logical choice, even if it means Mihai takes a job that he is totally overqualified for (he was a structural engineer in Romania). Lisbet, who works in the medical field, gets a job at a town's nursing facility. They move into a house neighboring the school principal and his retired lawyer wife, who have a teenage daughter, Noora, about the same age as Elia and Emmanuel, Mihai and Lisbet (Reinsve)'s two older children. They all attend the same school.

Generally welcoming and friendly, the townsfolk, for their liberal Northern European secular sensibility, Gheorghius are a little old fashioned and strict when it comes to their children - no cell phones, video games or social media allowed. They observe daily prayers and bible studies. It is fine what they do at home, stay at home, but they draw the line when Gheorghiu children start singing 'Amazing Grace' at school unprompted. The kids are reprimanded and Gheorghius is told that there's a strict separation of church and state, that a student can't influence another with their religious beliefs.

Things get bumpy when the school's PE teacher notices bruises on Elia's body. Upon examination and questioning Elia and Emmanuel, the school administrator become concerned that it might be child abuse at home and they notify child protective services right away. Elia and Emmanuel, the corporal punishment at home is a normal thing in their household. 'Slap in the butt' happens when they misbehave. But it is a big deal in Norway and they take allegations very seriously. The child protective services promptly take away all of Gheorghiu children, including the baby, whom Lisbet is still nursing.

Blindsided by the unfolding event and distressed, the Gheorghius solicit the help from their congregation in town and it becomes a huge international news. The media is framing it as child abuse versus oppression of religious freedom. Mild mannered Mihai becomes a posterboy for religious conservatism movement as the couple and the townsfolk get embroiled in the big custody battle court case.

Along with the title, snowy capped mountains surrounding the town and occasional avalanches stand as metaphor for the culture clash unfolding, Fjord is another tension filled, knotted social drama from Mungiu.

As usual, Mungiu presents characters navigating through our overly complicated current world, where any system is less than perfect and moral grey areas aplenty. He doesn't judge whether one system is worse than the other, he just expertly illuminates the differences, giving the sinewy human relations as much nuance as possible.

Double Take

Double Freedom/La Libertad Doble (2026) - Alonso To understand Double Freedom, a little bit of context is necessary: it was 25 years ago that Argentinian filmmaker, Lisandro Alonso, made his debut film, La Libertad/Freedom, at age 26. Since then, Argentina saw the resurgence of the national cinema, termed Nuevo Cine Argentino, along with the revitalizations of other Latin American countries' cinema, producing some of the most exciting, innovative films.

Along with Lucrecia Martel, Mariano Llinás, Matías Piñeiro and others, Alonso put Argentinian cinema on the global cinema map again, garnering much deserved attention and accolades. His reputation as a daring arthouse filmmaker, known for his boundary pushing, minimalistic, observational films, attracted foreign co-productions and yielded in collaboration with Hollywood actor Viggo Mortensen in Jauja in 2015, a Quixotic tale of lost daughter in the Argentine outback, where Mortensen takes on the role of Danish John Wayne in The Searchers. The ambitious triptych Eureka, came 8 years later, about the flight of the indigenous people in both South and North American continents across colonial and current timespan followed.

With his new film, Double Freedom/La Libertad Doble, Alonso is going back to his groundbreaking debut film where it all started, and picks up where he left off. In La Libertad, we meet a young lumberjack Misael (non-actor Misael Saavedra), chopping woods for local ranchers in the Pampas. Taking cues from the observational documentary tradition, the film showed Misael's daily routine, as he cooks, washes, defecates and chops woods, minimally interacting with others (who are also playing themselves). The lumberjack's daily routine and his solitary living made the audience question the nature of labor in the 21st century. Alonso's minimalism here was in itself radical. He wasn't representing the working men as the dignified beasts in the cog. As Misael kills and greedily eats armadillo at the end of the film, we knew Alonso was a different filmmaker, trying to get at something bigger and deeper than just representing 'workers' or 'exploitation' and such.

So 25 years have passed. Misael, now 25 years older, is not a young man anymore. But he leads the same life in the Pampas, chopping woods and sellingl them locally. The process is swift and almost mechanical and our lumberjack takes no time in felling a tree and stripping them and delivering them to the local ranchers, who use them as poles for their fences. You see the hard life and life experiences in his face and his actions. Yet, there is a continuity - his blue Mets baseball cap is the same, so is the big pitbull mix he keeps by his side - I have no idea if it's the same dog 25 years later or not.

One of his clients tells him that the local mental asylum is closing down due to lack of funding, that his sister Catalina (Catalina Saavedra) will be released. It's surprising news for Misael, who has been living a solitary life for decades now, in his ramshackle shack in the Pampas, now has a burden of taking care of his invalid sister. Catalina on the other hand, institutionalized for a long time, will taste her freedom in the outside world.

So Double Freedom has several meanings in Alonso's unusual sequel to his debut - the freedom afforded by living in the margins and in nature for Misael. Freedom from institutional confinement for Catalina. It also speaks of Alonso's filmmaking methods- not bound by traditional filmmaking, the film time-jumps, fastforwarding half a century, leaving the audience outside of time-space continuum, disoriented and confused - very much like David Lynch's Twin Peaks, the Return.

Using non-actors without much dialogue, Alonso's approach is that of Robert Bresson in the purist sense, stripping down all the artifacts and artificiality of filmmaking. Double Freedom questions what we regard as authentic representation of life and how the concept of freedom is ironically confined to the socio-political and individualized world view, with the true freedom always lies out of reach from us.