Margit’s and Katla’s mother has been stoned and burned for witchcraft, leaving them in need of a place to call home. She’s trying to stay alive, and Margit with her, bewitching the widower Jóhann (Valdimar Örn Flygenring), over the objections of his son, Jónas (Geirlaug Sunna Þormar), in a bid for shelter and sustenance. “Who was she?” asks Margit, the compassionate sibling. “They stoned her and left her for the ravens,” explains Katla in monotone. They kill each other, too, as Margit and her older sister, Katla (Bryndis Petra Bragadóttir), are reminded when they happen upon a waterlogged corpse floating face down in a puddle. The scope of nature suggests fantastical grandeur: Iceland is not humanity’s domain.
![juniper tree juniper tree](https://images.fineartamerica.com/images/artworkimages/mediumlarge/1/the-incredible-desert-juniper-tree-joseph-yvon-cote.jpg)
Keene and Sellars carry that theme by cutting to Margit (Björk) leaning against a boulder towering over her. Nature dominates, serene but forbidding at the same time. He’s unobtrusive as he makes his quiet vigil, so still at first that the shot looks like a freeze frame. Keene’s camera, guided by Randy Sellars, focuses on a fair-haired child tending a humble grave nestled against a stone wall’s staggered obsidian pitch. For proof, just watch the opening moments of The Juniper Tree, the debut feature from Boston-born filmmaker Nietzchka Keene and the first screen role of Icelandic singer Björk the film premiered at Sundance in 1990, but only now is getting its theatrical due in the United States.
![juniper tree juniper tree](https://www.treeguideuk.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/IMG_9178.jpg)
If the legends of any culture turn out to be true, they’ll be Iceland’s. Every country has folklore, of course, but not every country is built on a landscape like Iceland’s, haunted and alien at once: Reynisfjara’s black sand beach, with its asymmetrical cliffside rock formations Þingvellir’s eerie, too-quiet valley of rifts and waterfalls the grand, mighty Gullfoss.
![juniper tree juniper tree](https://images.fineartamerica.com/images/artworkimages/mediumlarge/1/juniper-tree-dead-horse-point-state-park-janet-brodsky.jpg)
Iceland’s the rare country whose fairy tales could conceivably be real.