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Fjord is the reigning Palme d’Or winner at Cannes. That puts director Cristian Mungiu on a very exclusive list of multiple Palme winners, alongside Michael Haneke, Ken Loach, and Francis Ford Coppola. He won for his unbearably tense abortion thriller 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, and nearly two decades later, the Romanian master’s skill at dismantling the gears of bureaucracy remains unparalleled. The difference is that now he works with legit movie stars: Fjord stars Sebastian Stan (aka Disney’s Marvel’s Bucky Barnes) and Renate Reinsve (having another monster year after the unexpected smash Backrooms), both fully deglammed, as a Romanian-Norwegian conservative couple facing scrutiny in a progressive remote Norwegian town. Inspired by the true case of the Bodnariu family, whose children were forcibly taken from them by the state, the film is a beguiling Rorschach test that poses thorny and uncomfortable questions about well-intentioned progressivism in a world grappling with vicious right-wing opportunism. Mungiu is in total control of the story he wants to tell and is deeply aware of how slippery this tale of religious persecution and government overreach is at this moment. This reactionary legal drama is sure to be one of the most hotly debated movies of the year. ~OO