Norway Custody Battle: Apostolos Kritikopoulos – Fjord
A Romanian director won Cannes' Palme d'Or for depicting a Christian family's struggle against Norway's child welfare system after relocating from Romania to a fjord village.
Fjords in Norway.
About two decades ago, when social media was launching the digital revolution of mass connectivity, I remember one of the first issues that shocked me was the socialist authoritarian character of power in the Scandinavian countries regarding the handling of family matters. I read with horror stories on Facebook and Twitter from fellow human beings who lost child custody of their children in a split second because the state deemed them unfit parents.
I was particularly pleased when I learned that a Balkan director, Romanian Cristian Mungiu, not only made the film Fjord which realistically depicts the brutality of the problem, but also won this year’s Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for this creation! So I rushed to watch the film at my favourite outdoor cinema in the area a few days ago.
In the first half of the film I could barely sit in my seat. The tension I felt watching the violence with which the system in Norway crushed a large family was unbearable. But to take things from the beginning: the film’s central story is the relocation of a Christian family with five children from Romania to a village in Norway built on a fjord.
There, the Christians are viewed with suspicion by the atheist and woke residents of the village, and then, with false accusations of domestic violence, the absolute socialist state intervenes through its omnipotent crushing welfare system and takes their children away. They even take the months-old infant who was breastfeeding from its mother, and force the nursing mother to send her breast milk by post to her child!
With absolute disgust I watched a society of informers who constantly make complaints to the nanny state about the Christians, because their child who is in first grade told a self-identifying lesbian 7-year-old classmate in the class that the Holy Scripture stipulates that homosexuality is a sin. For the Scandinavians, this is a criminal offence.
A terribly difficult film for me to watch because of my conservative value system that considers the family as the central cell of society that requires absolute protection, and not simply a random social construct as the welfare lawyer in the film said: any foster family is the same or even better than your biological family. I call on all readers to see the film, it is shattering.
