(Iran/1974—directed by Bahram Beyzaie)

One of the most mind-bending and muscular films of the Iranian New Wave, Bahram Beyzaie’s visionary 1974 drama was banned for decades following the Iranian Revolution. A startlingly dreamlike parable, The Stranger and the Fog begins with a man named Ayat arriving at a coastal village aboard a drifting boat, unconscious and with no memory of how he arrived. Villagers revive him and though they begin to accept him, his affection for a local widow kindles powerful tensions with her deceased husband’s family. After years of peace, still more strangers descend upon the village, turning a quiet mystery into a jaw-dropping spectacle, recalling some of the boldest action sequences of Kurosawa. This visually ravishing masterwork invents its own cinema-based mythology to examine the social conditions of pre-Revolutionary Iran.

Restored by Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation, with funding by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. In Farsi with English subtitles. (146 minutes)