Romanian filmmaker Mungiu’s socially conscious drama, which won the Golden Palm, addresses far more than a mere “witch hunt” or a dispute between Norway’s child protection services and Christian Romanian migrants. Ideological and moral grey areas come to the fore in a small Norwegian town, where the local community begins to pass judgment on the immigrant couple, played by Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve, and their family.

A photo of smiling parents with their five children. This is the picture-perfect life Romanian Mihai and Norwegian Lisbet imagined for themselves in a snowy Norwegian village. After meeting in a Pentecostal church, they settled down to build a life together in the affluent Nordic country. But behind the locals’ outward friendliness, Mihai and Lisbet soon begin to notice something quite different. Someone throws a stone and accuses the newcomers of having a negative influence on their children. As the imagined sense of community begins to fracture and Mihai and Lisbet’s approach to parenting escalates into a national scandal, while, like the harsh glacier-carved landscape around them, their ideals gradually begin to crumble.

Having worked as a journalist, Romanian filmmaker Mungiu, a two-time recipient of Cannes’ highest honour, draws on documentary stories and social tensions in his directorial work. He did so in both the Romanian New Wave landmark 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007) and the drama Graduation (2016), which was screened at RIGA IFF. Taking a bite into one of today’s most contentious issues – radicalism, popularly framed as the “culture wars” – Mungiu deftly asks viewers to step down from their preconceived positions and leads them through bureaucracy, systemic problems, faith and ideological manipulation. Shedding didacticism, bias and any idealised view of human nature, the director places two of today’s best-known actors – Romanian-American Stan and Norway’s answer to Annie Hall, Reinsve – at one end of the horseshoe of political extremism, rendered in his hallmark style of stark naturalism. And, as always, along with the story’s protagonists, the viewer gradually realises that what they’re seeing is an illusion.