Max Von Sydow, Birgitta Valberg, Gunnel Lindblom, Brigitta Pattersson

Winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring is a harrowing tale of faith, revenge, and savagery in medieval Sweden. Starring frequent Bergman collaborator and screen icon Max von Sydow, the film is both beautiful and cruel in its depiction of a world teetering between paganism and Christianity, and of one father’s need to avenge the death of a child.

Ingmar Bergman won his first Oscar and the international Critics Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1960 for The Virgin Spring, a brooding medieval tale based on an old Swedish ballad, closely comparable to The Seventh Seal, which examines the conflict between Christianity and the paganism rife throughout the Middle Ages. Set in beautiful 14th century Sweden, the film tells a sombre, powerful fable of peasant parents (Max Von Sydow and Birgitta Valberg) whose daughter, a young virgin (Birgitta Petterson), is brutally raped and murdered by swineherds after her half sister (Gunnel Lindblom) has invoked a pagan curse.
By a bizarre twist of fate, the murderers ask for food and shelter from the dead girl's parents, who, upon discovering the truth about their erstwhile lodgers, exact a chilling revenge. This cruel and sensational medieval allegory, made all the more powerful for the luminous, haunting black and white photography and Bergman's meticulous direction, was later to be notoriously remade by Wes Craven as Last House On The Left.