Nietzchka Keene’s The Juniper Tree is like a small, well-shaped gem. An independent film with an American director, it was shot on location in 1986 with an Icelandic cast and crew, only edited together three years later, premiered at Sundance in 1990, and then lay fallow in obscurity until a 2019 remastering paid for in part by George Lucas and Melody Hobson. Its writer/director died due to cancer in 2004, and never lived to see her work reappraised. That is truly an awful shame, because when viewed today it visibly prefigures a lot of subsequent independent cinema as well as the growing revival of folk horror on screen. It also marks, as an aside to its existing creative worth, the acting debut of Iceland’s most famous export: musician and singer Björk Guðmundsdóttir, then aged just 21 years old.

In a medieval Iceland, sisters Margit (Björk) and Katla (Bryndis Petra Bragadóttir) flee from their home when their mother is stoned for witchcraft. While hiding in a distant coastal region where they cannot be found, Katla enchants a widowed farmer Jóhann (Valdimar Örn Flygenring) to secure shelter for herself and her sister. This new arrangement incenses Jónas (Geirlaug Sunna Þormar), Jóhann’s young son from a previous marriage.

Keene takes the Grimm Brothers’ story “The Juniper Tree” as the basis for her films, adjusting the details while keeping its basic framework intact. While the original story focused on a wicked stepmother tormenting a young boy, here the narrative shows Katla in a far more sympathetic and understandable light. It is male fear that sees she and Margit running for their lives, and which robs them of their own mother, and it is male fear from Jónas that threatens to destroy the new life she has constructed.

This is distant, isolated film, with a total cast of five actors and delivered against a typically desolute background of Icelandic cliffs and fields. Keene shoots the film is stark black and white, giving the piece a detached and lyrical quality similar to what Jim Jarmusch would later achieve in Dead Man (1995, Jarmusch’s own film of course being prefigured by his absurdist Stranger Than Paradise in 1984). Visually there is also a clear debt to the aesthetics of Dreyer and Bergman, although it terms of tone and content Keene’s work varies considerably. There is a detached, dreamlike tone throughout, which gives the piece a rather creepy feeling, although while it seems a predecessor to 21st century folk horror cinema it should be noted that this is not, in itself, a horror film.

The film is well performed, particularly by Bragadóttir as Katla and Flygenring as Jóhann. Björk is solid and child-like as Margit, and had this first film gained wider distribution at the time I suspect she would have very well received. When viewed at the other end of a 30-year career in punk, pop, and avant-garde music it becomes rather difficult to separate art from artist.

It is genuinely dreadful that Nietzchka Keene died when she did, as The Juniper Tree suggests audiences lost a potentially brilliant voice in independent cinema. It is tremendous to see the film gain the second chance that she never had.

The Juniper Tree is available in the UK on a well-stocked BFI blu ray. Audiences in Melbourne can see the film in theatres from 30 November, when it screens as part of ACMI’s The Future and Other Fictions exhibition.