Gunnel Lindblom

The Seventh Seal -- Disillusioned and exhausted after a decade of battling in the Crusades, a knight encounters Death on a desolate beach and challenges him to a fateful game of chess.

Writer-director Henning Carlsen and actor Per Oscarsson scrape away everything non-essential from this world-famous Knut Hamsun story. HUNGER paints a landscape of obsession: the realm of a literally starving artist. Pontus, the protagonist in this terrifying tale, is possibly a genius and probably a madman, and he'll waste away before jeopardizing his talent, integrity, or even his soul. Stunning black-andwhite photography, Carlsen's perfectly focused screenplay and Oscarsson's scary, heartbreaking performance made this film a worldwide arthouse favorite upon its initial release.

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. 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.

Disillusioned and exhausted after a decade of battling in the Crusades, a knight (Max von Sydow) encounters Death on a desolate beach and challenges him to a fateful game of chess. Much studied, imitated, even parodied, but never outdone, Bergman’s stunning allegory of man’s search for meaning, The Seventh Seal (Det sjunde inseglet), was one of the benchmark foreign imports of America’s 1950s art-house heyday, pushing cinema’s boundaries and ushering in a new era of moviegoing.