Palme d’Or-Winning Filmmaker Cristian Mungiu in Conversation with
Roxana Marcoci, One of Contemporary Photography’s Leading Curatorial Voices
| Exhibition OpeningFriday, October 2, 7:00 – 9:00 PMRomanian Cultural Institute |
| Tudor Panduru |
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| The Romanian Cultural Institute in New York, in collaboration with Mobra Films in Romania and NEON, presents the official opening of “FJORD. The Pictures”, an exhibition of photographs by Palme d’Or-winning filmmaker Cristian Mungiu, taken between August 2024 and April 2025 while scouting locations and preparing his latest film, “FJORD“. Shot entirely on a phone, the photographs capture people, landscapes, colors, gestures, and fleeting moments that drew Cristian Mungiu’s attention along the way, revealing a personal photographic practice that has long existed alongside his cinema work. On Friday, October 2, Cristian Mungiu will be joined by Roxana Marcoci, The David Dechman Senior Curator and former Acting Chief Curator of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), for a special conversation marking the exhibition’s official opening. Taking “FJORD. The Pictures” as its point of departure, their exchange will offer a rare opportunity to encounter this less familiar dimension of Cristian Mungiu’s work through a conversation between the artist and one of the leading curatorial voices in contemporary art. One of the defining filmmakers of contemporary European cinema, Cristian Mungiu is internationally known for a body of work in which observation, framing, duration, and the minute details of human behavior carry extraordinary narrative and emotional weight. Yet long before making films, he was taking photographs. He began at sixteen and has continued ever since, photographing throughout his travels and, especially, while scouting locations and preparing his films. “FJORD. The Pictures” emerged from precisely such a process. Neither production stills nor conventional documentation of a film in the making, the photographs record people, places, light, color, and unexpected fragments of everyday life encountered along the way. Some belong to locations that would later enter the world of “FJORD“; others remain entirely independent of it. Presented individually and in sequences, they reveal a way of looking that exists alongside Cristian Mungiu’s filmmaking while retaining a language of its own. “I photograph the things that speak to me: through their visual form, their composition, their combination of colors, their atmosphere, their light. I photograph things I would have liked to paint, had I ever learned how to paint properly.” The evening takes place at a particularly significant moment for Cristian Mungiu and “FJORD” in New York, as the film is presented in the context of the New York Film Festival and enters its North American awards-season campaign, bringing Cristian Mungiu’s cinematic and photographic work into conversation within the same city and at the same moment. Yet “FJORD. The Pictures” is not an exhibition about the making of a film in the conventional sense. It offers something more intimate: an opportunity to encounter how Cristian Mungiu looks before he tells a story—the images he notices, the moments he chooses to preserve, and the fragments of reality that speak to him before any of them become cinema. |
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