Cristian Mungiu: FJORD. The Pictures

The Romanian Cultural Institute in New York, in collaboration with Mobra Films in Romania and NEON, presents FJORD. The Pictures, an exhibition of photographs by Palme d’Or-winning filmmaker Cristian Mungiu, on view at the Brâncuși Gallery from September 21 through November 30, 2026. Made between August 2024 and April 2025 while Mungiu was scouting locations and preparing his latest film, FJORD, the exhibition offers a rare encounter with a photographic practice that has accompanied his filmmaking for decades but has largely remained outside public view.

One of the defining filmmakers of contemporary European cinema, Mungiu is known for his attentiveness to human behavior and the environments in which stories unfold. FJORD. The Pictures shifts that attention from moving image to photograph. Shot entirely with a phone, the works move between landscapes, faces, architecture, objects, changing weather, unexpected encounters, and details that might otherwise disappear into everyday experience.

Although made during the preparation of FJORD, the photographs are neither production stills nor a conventional record of the film’s making. Some belong to places that would enter its visual world; others follow their own trajectories. Individually and in sequence, they form an autonomous body of images shaped by selection, proximity, repetition, and juxtaposition.

The exhibition thus opens a passage between photography and cinema. Location scouting—the search for spaces in which a story can take place—becomes an encounter with images that may precede the film, remain outside it, or acquire an independent life. What the camera finds along the way becomes as significant as what the filmmaker set out to find.

Removed from cinematic duration, dialogue, performance, and narrative, the photographs offer an intimate encounter with Mungiu’s visual world and the individual act of looking that precedes a film. Rather than another version of FJORD, they reveal a constellation of observations surrounding its creation and a less familiar dimension of Mungiu as an image-maker.

The New York presentation coincides with FJORD’s arrival in the city for the New York Film Festival and its North American awards-season campaign. On Friday, October 2, the exhibition officially opens with Cristian Mungiu in conversation with Roxana Marcoci, Senior Curator in the Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).