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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. With austere simplicity, the director tells the story of the rape and murder of the virgin Karin, and her father Tore's ruthless pursuit of vengeance, set in motion after the killers visit the family's farmhouse. Starring frequent Bergman collaborator and screen icon Max von Sydow, the film is both beautiful and cruel in it's depiction of a world teetering between paganism and Christianity.
- Winner, Best Foreign Film - Academy Awards, 1961
- Winner, Special Mention - Cannes Film Festival, 1960
- Winner, Best Foreign Film - Golden Globe Awards, 1961
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 the The Seventh Seal, which examines the conflict between Christainty 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 - The Exorcist - and Birgitta Valberg) whose daughter, a young virgin (Birgitta Pettersson), 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, hauting black and white photography and Bergman's meticulous direction, was later to be re-made by horror director Wes Craven (Scream) as Last House on the Left.
Max Von Sydow