In Nietzchka Keene’s somber 1990 adaptation of the Brothers Grimm’s “The Juniper Tree,” which stars Björk in her first feature film role and is currently being re-released in a 4k restoration, the story moves at its own deliberate pace. With a lulling rhythm that’s aching and laguid with no sense of urgency despite an atmosphere that weeps with prolonged grief and yearning, the film acts like a hymn. Mournful and repetitive, it follows the lives of two sisters in the Middle Ages after the death of their mother, who was stoned and burnt after being uncovered as a witch. The two make an escape and run into a recent widower with a young son. Jóhann (Valdimar Örn Flygenring) and his son Jónas (Geirlaug Sunna Þormar) are still despondent following the death of their wife and mother, and the eldest of the runaway sisters, Katla (Bryndis Petra Bragadóttir), uses...
- 3/19/2019
- MUBI
A film that’s every bit as lyrical and fraught as the T.S. Eliot poem it uses for a preface, Nietzchka Keene’s little-seen “The Juniper Tree” — shot in the summer of 1986, only to premiere at Sundance four years later after a series of financial woes — has long been thought of as the other Björk movie, the one she made before her feral, totemic, Falconetti-level performance in “Dancer in the Dark.” The one Björk made before she was even Björk.
Now, thanks to a stunning new 4K restoration made from the original 35mm camera negative, people will finally have a chance to appreciate this ethereal American gem as more than a footnote of its soon-to-be-iconic star’s career. Spellbinding as Björk’s screen presence was and has always been, “The Juniper Tree” deserves to be seen outside of her shadow.
Based on the spectacularly macabre Brothers Grimm story of the same name,...
Now, thanks to a stunning new 4K restoration made from the original 35mm camera negative, people will finally have a chance to appreciate this ethereal American gem as more than a footnote of its soon-to-be-iconic star’s career. Spellbinding as Björk’s screen presence was and has always been, “The Juniper Tree” deserves to be seen outside of her shadow.
Based on the spectacularly macabre Brothers Grimm story of the same name,...
- 3/14/2019
- by David Ehrlich
- Indiewire
We’ve devoured the land of our planet in an effort to call it our home. We’ve pulled the resources from her body, filled her oceans with litter, and damaged her atmosphere all in the foolish assumption that it was ours to do with as we pleased. We are small, and the Earth is not ours. She will outlive all of us, and we’ll merely be a fairy tale, a blip on her history. Most movies don’t reckon with the older, more mythical stance we held with nature in generations past, but Nietzchka Keene’s The Juniper Tree does. Shot on black-and-white 35mm, her 1990 picture charts the story of a ruptured family trying to gain some semblance of peace in an environment infused with mystical renderings of ghosts, witches, and moral curses acting as karmic gods.
The Juniper Tree takes its DNA from the Grimm Fairy Tale...
The Juniper Tree takes its DNA from the Grimm Fairy Tale...
- 3/13/2019
- by The Film Stage
- The Film Stage
"Out from here, away be gone." Arbelos Films has debuted a new trailer for the restored re-release of The Juniper Tree, a surrealist film from 1990 filmed in Iceland and made by filmmaker Nietzchka Keene. The film stars a young Björk (25 years old at the time) as a woman who flees her homeland in Iceland after her mother is killed for practicing witchcraft. Her older sister casts a spell on a farmer which makes him fall in love with her, but his son sees through her tricky plan. The full cast includes Bryndis Petra Bragadóttir, Valdimar Örn Flygenring, Guðrún Gísladóttir, and Geirlaug Sunna Þormar. This 4K restoration is from the Wisconsin Center for Film & Theater Research and The Film Foundation, with funding from the George Lucas Family Foundation. The Juniper Tree is described as a "potent allegory for misogyny and its attendant tragedies, [and] a major rediscovery for art house audiences." It seems very dreamlike and poetic.
- 3/10/2019
- by Alex Billington
- firstshowing.net
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