The Real Norwegian Child Protection Cases That Loosely Inspired ‘Fjord’

He remembers an anecdote about the real inhabitants of the two houses he uses in the film for the Gheorghius and Halbergs, who were in fact not communicating with one another. That all changed shortly after the production convinced one of them to allow the film crew to shoot in his house. Mungiu recalls the homeowner saying, “I will let you, but my neighbor is very grumpy. He hasn’t talked to me in the 10 years that we have been neighbors, so you are going to have problems with him.” But when the crew contacted the owner of the other house, they found that he was quite open-minded. “We asked him, ‘Do you have a conflict with your neighbor?’ He said, ‘No, but none of us have started a conversation, so I let him enjoy his privacy.’ At the end, they were communicating normally, and we had a very good relationship with both of them.”

No matter how neutral Mungiu tried to stay throughout his research process, there were some moments that made him face his own biases. “I went [to Norway] with this idea that I will meet a society that is not at all religious. This is the idea that we project onto the Protestant north.” As such, he was surprised to notice deeply rooted religious leanings there, especially among older people with a connection to the Norwegian church. He also learned about the younger population’s attraction to new neo-cult movements. “I watched at least a couple of documentaries about this phenomenon. People are really worried that the younger generations are [drawn to] these new cults. So I noticed that the people there are just as inclined to have religious beliefs as any other.”