About

I wanted to make a blackly brutal medieval ballad in the simple form of a folk-song. — Ingmar Bergman

Bergman won his first Academy Award ('Best Foreign Language Film' 1961) for the gripping The Virgin Spring, in which Max von Sydow plays a devout Christian father in the Middle Ages who discovers that he is housing the men who killed his daughter. The film is a powerful treatise on guilt and vengeance, fascinatingly complicated by screenwriter Ulla Isaksson's fascination with the conflict between Christianity and medieval paganism.

Bergman's technique on The Virgin Spring was inspired by his love of Japanese cinema — in particular, the films of Akira Kurosawa — and it is shot with a level of kineticism unusual for the Swedish filmmaker. The film would later be remade as Wes Craven's harrowing, provocative debut Last House on the Left 1972.

M | Moderate violence