FJORD. The Pictures | Exhibition Opening
Palme d’Or-Winning Filmmaker Cristian Mungiu in Conversation with Roxana Marcoci, One of Contemporary Photography’s Leading Curatorial Voices
About The Event
The Romanian Cultural Institute in New York, in collaboration with Mobra Films in Romania and NEON, presents the official opening of FJORD. The Pictures, an exhibition of photographs by Palme d’Or-winning filmmaker Cristian Mungiu, taken between August 2024 and April 2025 while scouting locations and preparing his latest film, FJORD. Shot entirely on a phone, the photographs capture people, landscapes, colors, gestures, and fleeting moments that drew Cristian Mungiu’s attention along the way, revealing a personal photographic practice that has long existed alongside his cinema work.
On Friday, October 2, Mungiu will be joined by Roxana Marcoci, The David Dechman Senior Curator and former Acting Chief Curator of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), for a special conversation marking the exhibition’s official opening. Taking FJORD. The Pictures as its point of departure, their exchange will offer a rare opportunity to encounter this less familiar dimension of Mungiu’s work through a conversation between the artist and one of the leading curatorial voices in contemporary art.
One of the defining filmmakers of contemporary European cinema, Cristian Mungiu is internationally known for a body of work in which observation, framing, duration, and the minute details of human behavior carry extraordinary narrative and emotional weight. Yet long before making films, he was taking photographs. He began at sixteen and has continued ever since, photographing throughout his travels and, especially, while scouting locations and preparing his films.
FJORD. The Pictures emerged from precisely such a process. Neither production stills nor conventional documentation of a film in the making, the photographs record people, places, light, color, and unexpected fragments of everyday life encountered along the way. Some belong to locations that would later enter the world of FJORD; others remain entirely independent of it. Presented individually and in sequences, they reveal a way of looking that exists alongside Cristian Mungiu’s filmmaking while retaining a language of its own.
“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.”
The evening takes place at a particularly significant moment for Cristian Mungiu and FJORD in New York, as the film is presented in the context of the New York Film Festival and enters its North American awards-season campaign, bringing Cristian Mungiu’s cinematic and photographic work into conversation within the same city and at the same moment.
Yet FJORD. The Pictures is not an exhibition about the making of a film in the conventional sense. It offers something more intimate: an opportunity to encounter how Cristian Mungiu looks before he tells a story—the images he notices, the moments he chooses to preserve, and the fragments of reality that speak to him before any of them become cinema.
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 Guests
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.
Roxana Marcoci is the David Dechman Senior Curator and former Acting Chief Curator of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art. She holds a PhD in art history, theory, and criticism from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. Recent exhibitions she curated accompanied by major publications include Taking Back Our Space: Photographic Perspectives (2026); LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity (2024); An-My Lê: Between Two Rivers (2023); Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear (2022). In 2010 Marcoci co-founded MoMA’s prestigious Forums on Contemporary Photography, an experimental platform for free-form critical discussions about the perspectives and scope of image-making among artists, curators, and cultural theorists. She has chaired the Central and Eastern European group (2013-2023) and is currently the co-Chair of the South-East and East Asia group of MoMA’s Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP) program. A contributor to numerous art magazines, she has co-authored the three-volume Photography at MoMA (2015/17), and Art and Theory of Post- 1989 Central and Eastern Europe: A Critical Anthology.
Official Opening
Friday, October 2, 2026 | 7:00 PM
Cristian Mungiu in Conversation with Roxana Marcoci
Exhibition on view September 21–November 30, 2026
Monday–Friday, 10:00 AM–6:00 PM
Brâncuși Gallery | Romanian Cultural Institute in New York
200 East 38th Street, New York, NY 10016
