The Real Child Protection Cases That Loosely Inspired Fjord

Written by Mungiu, Fjord follows Mihai and Lisbet Gheorghiu, a Romanian engineer and Norwegian nurse played by Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve, respectively. Set in their modest ways, the couple tries to settle into their lives in Norway, having moved there after the death of Mihai’s parents to be closer to Lisbet’s family. Raising their five children with a conservative ethos, they don’t quite mesh with the liberal community that surrounds them. But their eager kids still build close friendships with the children of their progressive neighbors, Mats and Mia Halberg, a development that further underscores the two families’—and consequently, the two belief systems’—political and practical differences.

Tensions rise in town when the kids’ school raises child-abuse allegations against the Gheorghius after teachers notice some mysterious bruising on one of their kids. While the film never spells out their precise origins, Barnevernet steps in at once, separating their five kids (including a baby, still breastfeeding) from Mihai and Lisbet, placing them in foster care after the couple admits to some physical discipline that would be considered mild in Mihai’s culture, but is against the law in Norway. Claiming that they are being harshly discriminated against due to their religion and conservative beliefs,  the couple asks help from Mia, an attorney, to represent their case in the Norwegian court.

Joining TIME on Zoom recently, Mungiu emphasizes that “the film is fictional. It’s not a reenactment associated with any one particular case.” Still, there were a number of real-life court cases that intrigued him as a storyteller with a journalism background. Chief among them was that of the Bodnariu family, who occupied international headlines for several months after they were separated from their five children in November 2015. Pentecostal parents Ruth and Marius were accused of domestic violence, with worldwide protests criticizing what dissenters called harsh and hasty steps taken by Norwegian social workers without proper evidence. In Romania, one of the indirect results of the wildly popular case went as far as a constitutional referendum in 2018 that aimed to alter the definition of a traditional family and prevent same-sex marriages. (The referendum eventually failed due to low turnout.)

Mungiu draws a direct connection between Fjord and his previous film, R.M.N. “In that film, I was trying to investigate how a conservative society reacts when someone who’s different from them comes into their world. We know that they’re not very welcoming or willing to accept differences. They don't understand that there's a bigger world out there. In Fjord, I really wanted to reverse this paradigm and to understand what happens when the conservatives are the minority in a progressive, liberal society.” According to Mungiu, we might expect that type of society to be more empathetic and inclusive, treating minorities with more compassion. But through his investigations, he got the sense that whoever’s in the majority feels entitled to impose their own point of view onto others. “This is not a good example that we wish to set for the conservative part of the society,” Mungiu reflects. “We shouldn't be behaving the same way they behave.”

On these grounds, the central question of Fjord is whether anyone can be truly objective toward people whose values they don’t share. The Gheorghius’ conservatism, for example, means they oppose same-sex marriage. So can viewers both disagree with the couple on those grounds, while also feel that they are being treated unfairly by Barnevernet?   It is a challenge that is essentially at the heart of the American justice system, which asks potential jurors to set all their biases aside and only assess the case in hand through proven facts. “I noticed that saying, ‘I'm here to [only] judge if they are guilty of what they are charged with’ isn’t easy, because you are biased by your own point of view of the world. But I hope that this is what the audience is going to do. The reason why I wanted to tell this story from this neutral perspective is that it is a rare opportunity of inviting not just one bubble that you sympathize with in your regular life. The other bubble exists and dialogue is needed to make the society a little bit more peaceful again. So I took this position of a mediator, if you will.”

A visual style in service of the film’s thesis

Similarly, he carefully scouted locations in sync with his ideas around isolation and lack of communication. “It was important for us to set this story in a small community, with two houses at the end of this fjord in a lovely but somehow curled world,” he explains. “It’s very majestic, and [it’s a location where] people will have to talk to one another eventually because there's nobody else around.”

He remembers an anecdote about the real inhabitants of the two houses he uses in the film for the Gheorghius and Halbergs, who were in fact not communicating with one another. That all changed shortly after the production convinced one of them to allow the film crew to shoot in his house. Mungiu recalls the homeowner saying, “I will let you, but my neighbor is very grumpy. He hasn’t talked to me in the 10 years that we have been neighbors, so you are going to have problems with him." But when the crew contacted the owner of the other house, they found that he was quite open-minded. “We asked him, ‘Do you have a conflict with your neighbor?’ He said, ‘No, but none of us have started a conversation, so I let him enjoy his privacy.’ At the end, they were communicating normally, and we had a very good relationship with both of them.”

Can a person ever really be fully objective?

No matter how neutral Mungiu tried to stay throughout his research process, there were some moments that made him face his own biases. “I went [to Norway] with this idea that I will meet a society that is not at all religious. This is the idea that we project onto the Protestant north.” As such, he was surprised to notice deeply rooted religious leanings there, especially among older people with a connection to the Norwegian church. He also learned about the younger population’s attraction to new neo-cult movements. “I watched at least a couple of documentaries about this phenomenon. People are really worried that the younger generations are [drawn to] these new cults. So I noticed that the people there are just as inclined to have religious beliefs as any other.”

With this discovery, Mungiu eventually eliminated various scenes in Fjord which would have insinuated that Norwegian people saw the world in a more rational way only because they weren’t religious. “Making decisions on rational grounds is of course a very good thing to do,” Mungiu explains. “But [there is also] this need of belonging to something bigger than just [rationality] that we all feel. Some people still long for the discomfort that there's something bigger than them. And as long as this belief places them on the right side of the world through [tolerance] and [inclusivity], I think we should be tolerant to it.”

His time in Norway also led Mungiu to learn more about the Sami people. “I didn’t know much about them before, but the Sami population sets a good [historical] example about how bigger communities and countries were not acting in an ethical way towards minorities. You can see this in the U.S. as well, [in the way] Native Americans were treated,” he adds. “And I think that we should learn from this [that] maybe this ‘we want to civilize you’ idea is not the most ethical one,” he reflects, clarifying that while everyone should obey the laws and respect the culture of the country they live in, real integration cannot happen by enforcing one’s own values onto others. “That won't change [the way] someone thinks. You will just frustrate them, [reinforcing] that there is a hypocrisy in the world.”