FJORD. The Pictures
Updated: 5 days ago
Photographs by Palme d’Or-winning filmmaker Cristian Mungiu
About The Event
The Romanian Cultural Institute in New York, in collaboration with Mobra Films in Romania and NEON, presents FJORD. The Pictures, an exhibition of photographs by Palme d’Or-winning filmmaker Cristian Mungiu, on view at the Brâncuși Gallery from September 21 through November 30, 2026. Made between August 2024 and April 2025 while Cristian Mungiu was scouting locations and preparing his latest film, FJORD, the exhibition offers a rare encounter with a photographic practice that has accompanied his filmmaking for decades but has largely remained outside public view.
Known internationally as one of the defining filmmakers of contemporary European cinema, Cristian Mungiu has built a body of work distinguished by an extraordinary attentiveness to human behavior and to the environments in which stories unfold. FJORD. The Pictures shifts that attention from the moving image to the photograph. Shot entirely with a phone, the works move between landscapes, faces, architecture, objects, changing weather, unexpected encounters, and small details that might otherwise disappear into the flow of everyday experience.
Although the photographs emerged during the preparation of FJORD, they are not production stills, nor do they constitute a conventional record of the making of the film. Some belong to places and environments that would become part of its visual world; others follow their own associations and trajectories. Seen individually and in sequences, they reveal an autonomous body of images shaped by selection, proximity, repetition, and juxtaposition.
The exhibition therefore opens a compelling passage between photography and cinema. Location scouting is ordinarily understood as a practical stage in filmmaking—the search for the spaces in which a story can take place. Here, that process becomes something else as well: an encounter with images that may precede the film, remain outside it, or acquire a life independent of it. What the camera finds along the way becomes as significant as what the filmmaker originally set out to find.
This is also what makes FJORD. The Pictures an unusually intimate encounter with Cristian Mungiu’s visual world. Removed from cinematic duration, dialogue, performance, and narrative, the photographs allow us to consider the individual act of looking that comes before these elements are assembled into a film. They reveal not another version of FJORD, but a constellation of observations surrounding its creation—and, through them, a less familiar dimension of Cristian Mungiu as an image-maker.
The New York presentation coincides with an important moment for FJORD, as the film arrives in the city in the context of the New York Film Festival and its North American awards-season campaign. On Friday, October 2, the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York will mark the exhibition’s official opening with a special evening featuring Cristian Mungiu in conversation with Roxana Marcoci, Senior Curator in the Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
Exhibition on view: September 21–November 30, 2026
Visiting hours: Monday–Friday, 10:00 AM–6:00 PM
Artist Statement
I have been taking photographs since I was sixteen. Does that make me a “photographer”? I don’t know. Probably not, since I have never properly studied the technique of photography. Are those who have studied photographic technique “photographers”? Or those who practice photography professionally? I don’t know that either. Today, now that capturing images has become democratized and technology allows anyone to “take pictures,” it is even more difficult to say who can consider themselves a “photographer” and who is simply someone who “takes pictures” to preserve memories.
I photograph the things that speak to me: through their visual form, their composition, their combination of colors, their atmosphere, their light. I photograph things I would have liked to paint, had I ever learned how to paint properly. I never did. But I “see” those “paintings” in the world around me, and the frame recomposes them into visual compositions that stand on their own.
I have developed a habit of bringing together photographs that have something in common, that complement one another and enter into dialogue. Photographs that, together, speak about something deeper than they do separately. I photograph empty Coca-Cola cans all over the world. In different contexts. It is my way of talking about globalization. Or bicycles. They are my way of talking about sustainability.
I am drawn to candid photographs. Ideally, with people in them. Every person caught in a private moment, when they are not “posing,” allows us a glimpse into their soul.
I take many photographs while scouting locations for my films. Some of those images become the background upon which scenes in the film will eventually be built. Ideally, they will add to the meaning of what happens there, perhaps even heighten it, rather than remaining merely illustrative backgrounds.
I photograph the people I encounter in the course of making films. Every face has its own story.
This exhibition focuses exclusively on photographs taken during the preparation of Fjord, between August 2024 and April 2025.
The photographs were taken with a phone. Their resolution has been enhanced, but otherwise they have not been technically altered in any way.
They are snapshots capturing fragments of life that caught my attention.
About the Artist
Born in Iaşi, Romania in 1968, Cristian Mungiu started as a writer, journalist, photographer and teacher before moving on to filmmaking. He published a couple of books and had personal exhibitions of photography. He founded the festivals Les Films de Cannes à Bucarest and American Independent Film Festival. He served in the juries of film festivals such as Cannes in 2013 and Venice in 2025. His debut film, OCCIDENT / WEST, premiered in Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes in 2002, was a festival success and an audience hit in Romania. 4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS was awarded the Palme d’Or in Cannes in 2007. The film received several Best Film of the Year awards from international associations of film critics such as LA Film Critic Association, NY, Film Critics’ Circle, Independent Spirit Awards and FIPRESCI. The film won the European Film Academy awards for Best Film and Best Director. Mungiu returned to Cannes in 2009 as a writer-producer-co-director with the collective episodic film TALES FROM THE GOLDEN AGE, and as a writer-director in 2012 with BEYOND THE HILLS – double awarded in Cannes for Best Screenplay and Best Actresses. R.M.N. premiered in competition at Cannes in 2022 while BACALAUREAT / GRADUATION, won him Best Director in Cannes in 2016. TRAFFIC, that he wrote and co-produced, represented Romania for the Academy Awards 2025. FJORD, his seventh feature as writer-director, will premiere in competition at Cannes in 2026 and will be his first in a foreign language (English, Norwegian), starring Renate Reinsve and Sebastian Stan.
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