Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord, this year’s Palme d’Or winner with Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve, reaches the Royal Festival Hall as a London Film Festival gala.
This year’s Palme d’Or reaches London on Saturday 17 October 2026, when Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord plays the Royal Festival Hall in its UK premiere, one of the festival’s afternoon galas.
Mungiu was born in Iași in 1968 and studied English literature there, then worked for some years as a teacher and a journalist before training as a director in Bucharest, graduating in 1998. His first feature, Occident, was selected for the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes in 2002. His second, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, won the Palme d’Or in 2007, the first for a Romanian filmmaker, and made him a central figure of the Romanian New Wave. Beyond the Hills took the screenplay prize at Cannes in 2012, and Graduation shared the prize for direction four years later. Fjord made him the tenth filmmaker to win the Palme d’Or twice.
The film follows an evangelical family who move to a small Norwegian town, and whose quiet settling in breaks apart when suspicions about their children’s wellbeing place the parents under close scrutiny. Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve play the couple, with Lisa Carlehed, in Norwegian, English, Swedish and Romanian, and Mungiu wrote the screenplay himself.
The gala begins at 2pm and is the film’s one screening in the hall, with a second date at Vue West End the following evening, before Picturehouse Entertainment releases it in British cinemas.