Starry new drama Fjord pits conservatives against liberals - and is set to divide audiences

Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve star as a Christian couple whose parenting is attacked – the film has become one of the 2026 Cannes Film Festival's biggest talking points. Sebastian Stan is best known for playing Marvel's bionic-armed Winter Soldier, but he isn't afraid of more controversial roles. Most obviously, he was a young Donald Trump in a contentious biopic, The Apprentice, which debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in 2024. And at this year's Cannes, he's in a drama that is proving to be even more divisive. Written and directed by Cristian Mungiu, a Romanian writer-director who won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2007, Fjord pairs Stan with Renate Reinsve, the Oscar-nominated star of last year's Sentimental Value. They're both at a point in their careers where they could be Hollywood's hottest new romantic-comedy couple, so it's impressive to see them going in a very different direction. Stan plays Mihai Gheorgiu, a bald, bespectacled and entirely un-Winter-Soldier-ish engineer who, like the actor himself, comes from Romania. Reinsve plays his Norwegian wife, Lisbet. Together with their five children, the couple has just moved from Romania to a village in Norway, with spectac