Midori Hirano x 'The Juniper Tree'

The movie

An overlooked talent during her lifetime, director, professor, and Fulbright scholar Nietzchka Keene made a striking debut with The Juniper Tree, a stark and poetic feature loosely based on the Brothers Grimm fairy tale. The film stars Björk in her first on-screen role and premiered to critical acclaim at the 1991 Sundance Film Festival. It paved the way for Keene’s later work, including Heroine of Hell (1996) and Barefoot to Jerusalem (2008), the latter completed after her untimely death in 2004.

Set in medieval Iceland, The Juniper Tree follows Margit (a magnetic Björk) and her older sister Katla as they flee after their mother is executed for witchcraft. They find refuge with a widower and his troubled young son, but tension mounts as Katla’s powers begin to surface. Shot entirely on location in Iceland’s breathtaking landscapes and captured in haunting black-and-white by Randy Sellars, the film evokes the spiritual intensity of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Day of Wrath and Bergman’s The Virgin Spring. With dreamlike interludes by experimental filmmaker Pat O’Neill, it stands as a powerful allegory of misogyny and its consequences — a long-overdue rediscovery for arthouse audiences.

In collaboration with Arbelos Films, we invited composer, pianist and producer Midori Hirano to create a brand-new score for this remarkable film.

The artist

Midori Hirano is a Berlin-based musician, composer and producer from Kyoto, Japan. Classically trained as a pianist, she combines acoustic instruments like piano and strings with experimental textures, blending digital sounds, subtle electronics and field recordings.

‘’The film shows many raw aspects of human nature, such as madness, silence, loss, love, seduction, friendship, deception, self-preservation and innocence, but they are all expressed in a fantastically fragile way. The exciting challenge for me is to incorporate that fragility in the music while keeping its strength’’.
 - Midori Hirano