One of the most mysterious and magisterial films of the Iranian New Wave, Bahram Beyzaie’s visionary 1974 drama was banned for decades following the Iranian Revolution. A relentlessly oneiric parable, The Stranger and the Fog begins with the titular stranger, named Ayat, arriving at a coastal village on the Persian Gulf aboard a drifting boat, unconscious and with no memory of how he arrived there. The villagers revive him and, some time later, he falls in love with a local widow, causing tensions with her deceased husband’s family. After years of peace, still more strangers descend upon the village from the sea in search of Ayat. This visually ravishing masterwork invents its own mythology to critique the sociopolitical conditions of 1970s Iran. A Janus Films release.