The Cinematheque

New Restoration

“Distinctive, ambitious, and genuinely poetic.”

Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times

Icelandic musical phenom Björk vowed to never act again after her heartrending, Cannes-winning performance in Lars von Trier’s devastating Dancer in the Dark. It feels like a miracle, then, that her ethereal onscreen presence can be experienced anew thanks to the rediscovery and re-release of The Juniper Tree, her first feature-film role. Written and directed by the late, unsung American filmmaker and Fulbright scholar Nietzchka Keene, and based on the eponymous Brothers Grimm fairy tale, this medieval-set fable concerns a pair of sisters who flee their Icelandic village after their mother is burned for witchcraft. They find refuge with a widower and his resentful young son, who suspects the eldest sister of sorcery. Shot entirely on location in the primordial landscapes of Iceland in exquisite black-and-white, Keene’s remarkable and mystical debut—now gorgeously restored—is a potent allegory of misogyny that evokes Dreyer’s Day of Wrath and Bergman’s The Virgin Spring.