FJORD. The Pictures
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
Cristian Mungiu is a Romanian filmmaker and one of the defining figures of the Romanian New Wave, internationally recognized for films that explore the moral, social, and political complexities of contemporary Romanian society.
Born in Iași, Romania, on April 27, 1968, Mungiu studied English Literature at Alexandru Ioan Cuza University before working as a teacher and journalist. He later studied Film Directing at the I. L. Caragiale National University of Theatre and Film in Bucharest, graduating in 1998.
After directing several short films, Mungiu made his feature debut with Occident (2002), which premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival. His international breakthrough came with his second feature, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007). Set during the final years of communist Romania, the film premiered in Competition at Cannes and won the Palme d’Or, making Mungiu the first Romanian filmmaker to receive the festival’s highest honor.
He returned to the Cannes Competition with Beyond the Hills (2012), for which he received the Best Screenplay Award, while lead actresses Cristina Flutur and Cosmina Stratan jointly received the Best Actress Award. His next feature, Graduation (2016), earned Mungiu the Best Director Award at Cannes, shared with Olivier Assayas. That same year, he was invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
In 2022, Mungiu returned to Cannes with R.M.N., a drama examining migration, prejudice, identity, and social tensions within a multiethnic community in Transylvania.
His 2026 drama Fjord, starring Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve, marked another major milestone in his career, winning the Palme d’Or at the 79th Cannes Film Festival. The distinction made Mungiu the tenth filmmaker in the festival’s history to win the Palme d’Or twice.
Mungiu has cited Miloš Forman and Robert Altman among his important cinematic influences and has expressed particular admiration for the tradition of cinematic realism exemplified by films such as Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves. His own work is distinguished by a rigorous realist approach, understated performances, long takes, and a sustained interest in the ethical dilemmas faced by individuals navigating complex social systems.
Beyond directing and screenwriting, Mungiu has worked as a producer and has maintained a close relationship with the Cannes Film Festival, serving on its Competition jury in 2013 and presiding over the Critics’ Week jury in 2021. Through a body of work that combines intimate human stories with incisive observations of society, he has become one of the most internationally acclaimed Romanian filmmakers of his generation.
