THE VIRGIN SPRING

Sunday, June 6th at 1:00 p.m.
and Tuesday, June 8th at 7:00 p.m.
ADMISSION: FREE
**Suggested donation: $5.00**

All ESSENTIAL CINEMA films screen Sunday at 1:00 p.m. and Tuesday at 7:00 p.m., and admission is FREE!
See classic art films the way they were meant to be seen - with an audience and on the big screen in 35 mm!

ACADEMY AWARD WINNER! Best Foreign Language Film, 1961

"Bergman's luminous medieval allegory ... Creates an extraordinary metaphysical charge." - TIME OUT FILM GUIDE

"A beautiful film, tightly woven with honest, unshowy performances and a whiff of dastardly magic ... a strange and luminous experience ... never were the mysteries of divine grace nearer to being captured on celluloid." - CHANNEL 4 FILMS

"An emotionally devastating experience, THE VIRGIN SPRING elicits a deep appreciation of life through its depiction of senseless death and the futility of revenge." - DVD VERDICT REVIEW

Legendary Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman won his first Oscar for this cruel but unsensational medieval allegory, a harrowing tale of faith, revenge, and savagery in 13th century 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.
On her way to church, the 15-year-old virgin daughter of peasant parents is savagely assaulted and murdered by two goatherds. Later, in a bizarre twist of fate, the culprits ask for food and shelter at the house of the dead girl's parents. Discovering the truth when the goatherds offer to sell them their dead daughter's bloodstained clothes, the parents exact a brutal revenge.
A highly-charged cinematic experience, THE VIRGIN SPRING's formal simplicity and overt symbolism (light and dark, fire and water) undercut the potentially sensationalist elements of the material, and Sven Nykvist's luminous black-and-white cinematography conspires with the austerity of Bergman's imagery to create an extraordinary metaphysical impact.
An influential arthouse classic, THE VIRGIN SPRING also inspired an unofficial grindhouse "remake" with Wes Craven's controversial 1972 shocker THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT.