Nicusor Dan after Mungiu’s Cannes triumph:Contemporary national cinema is an excellent calling card for Romania

President Nicusor Dan sent a message of congratulation on Sunday to director Cristian Mungiu after his feature film ‘Fjord’ won the Palme d’Or at the 79th Cannes Film Festival, pointing out that contemporary Romanian cinema ‘is an excellent calling card for Romania’.

‘Congratulations to Cristian Mungiu for his second Palme d’Or at Cannes, an extraordinary achievement. Congratulations to the entire film team, with many Romanians involved, and to Sebastian Stan in the leading role. What I have appreciated in Mungiu’s previous films is that they ask questions, that they walk the fine line between two or more sets of values in conflict. For me, this is the meaning of art: understanding the human condition from as many perspectives as possible. It is also a recognition of the new wave of Romanian cinema – Cristi Puiu, Corneliu Porumboiu, Catalin Mitulescu and all the others. They had the courage to express themselves differently from the cinema before them, to engage directly and capture the questions of a society in transformation, thus often reaching universality,’ Nicusor Dan wrote on Facebook.

He added that contemporary Romanian cinema is an excellent calling card for Romania, and that the authorities must do much more to harness it to the benefit of the country and of national filmmaking.

According to the festival’s official website, ‘Fjord’ is a film about the difficulty of understanding someone who thinks differently – a story about polarisation, the inability to engage in dialogue, the things that divide people and those that still hold them together.

Cristian Mungiu returned to Cannes’ main competition with the same artistic resolve that earned him the Palme d’Or in 2007 (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days), the Best Screenplay Award in 2012 (‘Beyond the Hills’) and the Best Director Award in 2016 (‘Graduation’). AGERPRES (RO – writing by: Mihai Stoica; EN – writing by: Simona Klodnischi)