Palme d’Or-Winning Filmmaker Cristian Mungiu in Conversation with Roxana Marcoci, One of Contemporary Photography’s Leading Curatorial Voices
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, 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 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.
Official Opening
Friday, October 2, 2026 | 7:00 PM
Cristian Mungiu in Conversation with Roxana Marcoci
Exhibition on view September 21–November 30, 2026
Monday–Friday, 10:00 AM–6:00 PM
Brâncuși Gallery | Romanian Cultural Institute in New York
200 East 38th Street, New York, NY 10016
Event venue
Romanian Cultural Institute, 200 E 38th St, New York, NY 10016, United States
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