Six weeks ago (6.24.26) it was announced that Neon would open Cristian Mungiu‘s Fjord, the 2026 Palme d’Or winner at the conclusion of last May’s Cannes Film Festival, on Friday, October 9th.
I predicted that day that the launch of the forthcoming anti-Fjord attacks, based on an apparent woke-mob consensus that Mungiu’s film is MAGA-minded and therefore needs to be dismissed or otherwise elbowed aside during the fall award sesaon, would begin “no later than Labor Day.”
I was wrong. The anti-Fjord woke reptile offensive began today — Wednesday, August 5th — with the announcement that Fjord would not be included in the 2026 New York Film Festival lineup. The NYFF will run between Wednesday, 9.25.26 and Monday, 10.12.26. Fjord will open commercially on Friday, 10.9, but could obviously have been screened at the NYFF between, say, Friday, 9.25 and Sunday 10.4.
This is the first time since 2015 that NYFF has snubbed the previous May’s Palme D’or winner.
Given the prominence and praise that Fjord earned in Cannes plus the general tradition of the NYFF always including major Cannes titles in the NYFF lineup, it’s an obvious snub that amounts to a political / cultural statement of dismissal to not program Fjord at the NYFF.
This unmistakably confirms that the woke comintern intends to brush Fjord aside by hook or by crook.
It makes no marketing sense at all for Neon to have declined to offer Fjord for the NYFF. It seems obvious to anyone with half a brain that the NYFF committee declined to program it because of negative sentiments in elite woke circles (i.e., a 5.23 Facebook comment from a certain unnamed film curator and passed along second-hand by B. Ruby Rich that it’s “a MAGA film“).
NY Film Festival programmers Dennis Lim, Justin Chang, Ally Nash, Florence Almozini and Rachel Rosen (have I missed anyone?) should be ashamed of themselves. Fjord won the Palme d’Or, and these bozos excluded it three months later from the NYFF??
Costarring Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve as a strictly religious couple-with-kids who fall under woke scrutiny and legal prosecution when they move to a small Norwegian village, Fjord will instantly and indisputably become a leading nominee for Best Int’l Feature Oscar.
I predicted many weeks ago that Mungiu’s film would also be subjected to relentless side-eye treatment from woke critics who will try to more or less “take it down” — a death-of-a-thousand cuts diminishment campaign that won’t involve angry attacks as much as a dismissive chip-chip-chisel-chisel strategy.
Fjord‘s NYFF exclusion is the first significant chip-chip-chisel-chisel.
They’ll do what they can to kill Fjord by calling it well made but lacking dramatic oomph, low-key, “doesn’t take sides”, etc.
All the big reptilian woke lawyers will all go after Fjord with fine scalpels because — this is key — this brilliant film is not so much a portrait of a progressive community trying to subject a conservative couple to the political lash as a larger-canvas indictment of international woke Stalinism. (I know that the word “Stalinism” sounds a bit inflammatory.)
In a 5.27 New Yorker piece titled “All the Films in Competition at Cannes 2026, Ranked from Best to Worst“, Chang dismissively ranked Fjord, the festival’s only home-run knockout in my view, as the 11th best film he saw in Cannes, while snooting the following sentence: “More than a few wondered if Mungiu, whose Romanian-set films have forcefully criticized religious fundamentalism, had suddenly moved rightward as his camera drifted west [to Norway].”
HE interjection: “More than a few” alludes to the same people B. Ruby Rich and her “esteemed U.S. curator” had been chatting with in Cannes. The notion that Mungiu’s social-political perceptions may have “suddenly moved rightward” is an oblique, carefully phrased, typically Chang-ian way of saying Mungiu’s thinking (on this film at least) may have gone MAGA.
Postscript: I’ve reached out to Neon’s Tom Quinn via Perception’s Liz Berger to ask for some clarification. I know it would MAKE NO SENSE for Neon not to submit Fjord to the NYFF…absolutely illogical. Anyway, I just wrote Quinn directly so maybe he’ll reply to my request for a brief OTR chat. But he’ll probably ignore me. He doesn’t want to even begin to create the appearance of a contentious relationship with the NYFF, despite what they’ve just done to him and to Fjord.