Fjord is Romania's 42nd Oscar entry. The first 41 got one nomination

Romania has sent 42 films to the Oscar for best international feature since 1966. One of them has been nominated.

The sum is easy to check. Romania Insider counted 36 submissions in March 2021, when Alexander Nanau's Collective became the first Romanian film ever nominated in the category. Six entries have followed, one a year. Cristian Mungiu's Fjord is number 42.

It is also the second Palme d'Or that Romania has put into this race. What happened to the first one is the reason the second one is worth watching.

Fjord won the top prize at the 79th Cannes Film Festival in May, as Variety reported, making Mungiu one of the small group of directors to take the Palme twice. It is a Norway-set drama about an immigrant family, starring Renate Reinsve and Sebastian Stan, and it collected the FIPRESCI, Ecumenical Jury and François Chalais prizes on the same night, according to NPR. A commission appointed by the Romanian Film Centre chose it unanimously on 2 September, per Variety. The Academy's deadline for entries falls on Wednesday.

The rule Mungiu's first Palme d'Or wrote

Mungiu won his first in 2007, for 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, a film about an illegal abortion in the last years of Ceaușescu's Romania. The country submitted it for the 80th Academy Awards. It did not make the shortlist.

The Academy responded by changing the machinery. From 2008 the voting committee's choices were topped up by an international executive committee, which met in private and added three titles to complete the shortlist. The trade called those additions the saves. Deadline has been plain about where they came from: the committee was instituted after voters left the 2007 Palme d'Or winner off the list.

Which is worth stating flatly. The only corrective mechanism this category has ever had was built because of a Mungiu film.

It worked quietly and nobody could ever prove it. The saves were decided behind a closed door, and the Academy has never confirmed which films were rescued, so the best-known example, Paolo Sorrentino's eventual winner The Great Beauty, remains a rumour that has circulated for a decade without ever being verified.

And the rule the Academy took away

In January 2021 it went. The shortlist grew from ten titles to 15, every one of them decided by vote, and the executive committee's three picks were abolished, Variety reported at the time. The reasoning was logistical rather than principled. The committee could not safely meet in a room that winter, and the Academy was not willing to hold a debate about which films to rescue over a video call.

Five years on, an emergency measure is simply how the category works. A larger shortlist and a pure popular vote is a defensible design, and plenty of people who make films outside the United States prefer it to three producers arguing in a screening room. It also means that when the vote misses something, nothing happens.

There is a fair objection to all this, and it is Romania's own. Collective was nominated at the 93rd Academy Awards in international feature and documentary feature at once, the second film in Oscar history to manage both, after North Macedonia's Honeyland, as ABC7 reported. That happened in the first year the saves were gone. When Romania finally got through, it got through on votes.

What the previous 41 produced

Set against the standing of the Romanian New Wave, the record is thin. Mungiu's Beyond the Hills reached the December shortlist for the 85th Academy Awards and stopped there. Cristi Puiu's Sieranevada was the 2016 entry and went nowhere. Radu Jude's Berlin Golden Bear winner Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn went in for 2021 and was not nominated either.

So the country has now offered the Academy a Golden Bear winner and two Palme d'Or winners, and the one film it got a nomination for was a documentary about the aftermath of a Bucharest nightclub fire that killed 64 people. That is not a comment on Collective, which is superb. It is a comment on what this category rewards, which is a film voters have heard of and can be persuaded to watch in December.

On that measure Fjord is better placed than its predecessors. Two recognisable leads, the year's biggest festival prize, and a subject that travels. A popular vote is not obviously the enemy of a film like that.

The field it enters

Denmark has Woman Unknown, which won the Golden Lion at Venice this month along with the Volpi Cup for best actress for Mathilde Arcel, per Variety. May el-Toukhy was the only woman to direct a competition film on her own at a festival whose artistic director had spent the opening week arguing that the quality simply was not there, as we reported. South Korea has Lee Chang-dong's Possible Love. Spain has La Bola Negra, which took the audience award at Toronto. France has entered Minotaur, which contains no French at all.

Entries were still landing over the weekend. Sri Lanka picked Lalith Rathnayake's Riverstone, its first submission since 2009, the Daily Mirror reported. Vietnam's culture ministry signed off Spirit Guardians: The Last Secret of the First Emperor on 25 September, with its producers given until 17:00 on 1 October to deliver a DCP and a subtitled copy. Last year 92 films were submitted and 86 were ruled eligible, according to Gold Derby.

One last precedent, from the most recent ceremony. The 2025 Palme d'Or winner, Jafar Panahi's It Was Just an Accident, was nominated at the 98th Academy Awards in March and lost to Norway's Sentimental Value. A Palme gets a film watched. It does not get it the statue.

The 15-film shortlist is announced on 15 December, nominations follow on 21 January, and the 99th Academy Awards are held on 14 March 2027.