PORTUGAL PERSPECTIVE

Lisbon celebrates, with undisguised admiration, Cristian Mungiu's second Palme d'Or for 'Fjord' at the 79th Cannes Film Festival. For Portuguese media, the award comes as no surprise: Observador presents it as an inevitable outcome for a film described as "cutting" and "incisive"—depicting a devout Catholic family, Romanian father and Norwegian mother, caught in a bureaucratic ordeal after social services remove their five children, down to the infant, based solely on unsubstantiated school rumors.

The Lisbon daily emphasizes the film's grounding in reality: Mungiu invented nothing. The story unfolds in one of the world's most developed democracies, Norway, which heightens its troubling character. The mise-en-scene—never showing the alleged abuses on screen—leaves viewers face-to-face with their own certainties and prejudices. For Observador, Mungiu stands on the right side of history.

With this Palme, Mungiu, 58, joins a highly select group: he becomes the tenth filmmaker in the festival's history to win the top prize twice, alongside Francis Ford Coppola, the Dardenne brothers, Michael Haneke, and Ken Loach. Público describes this circle as "the ten notables." His first Palme dated back to 2007, for "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days."

One detail particularly captures Portuguese readers' attention: 'Fjord' has guaranteed theatrical distribution in Portugal through NOS, ensuring a cinema release in the country. The press openly invites its audience to prepare to discover the film.

This year's awards were marked by numerous ties—three categories shared—and the dominance of non-anglophone cinemas. The Grand Prize went to exile Russian filmmaker Andrei Zviaguintsev for 'Minotaur'; the Jury Prize to German director Valeska Grisebach for 'Das getraemte Abenteuer.' The Best Director prize was split between Spanish filmmakers Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi ('La Bola Negra') and Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski ('Fatherland').

In his acceptance speech, Mungiu declared: 'Societies today are fractured and radicalized. This film is a commitment against all forms of fundamentalism.' Words that Portuguese media retain as the very essence of the work, at a festival whose master of ceremonies Eye Haidara had warned that films had arrived 'charged with the noise of the world.'