The Stranger and the Fog: Three Readings of One Film

From Thursday, August 27 to Sunday, August 30, 2026, the American Cinematheque presents "Bahram Beyzaie: An American Cinematheque Tribute" at the Los Feliz 3 in Los Angeles, co-presented with the Farhang Foundation and the PARS Equality Center. The program opens with "Dialogue with the Wind" and Killing Mad Dogs, followed the next day by "Journey," "Uncle Mustache" and Downpour, then Ballad of Tara on Saturday, and on Sunday, August 30 at six in the evening, Bashu, the Little Stranger and The Stranger and the Fog back to back.

This is a tribute to Beyzaie following his death. He died on December 26, 2025, on his eighty-seventh birthday, in Palo Alto, California.

The Stranger and the Fog is his second feature. He wrote the screenplay in 1972; shooting took place in Asalem on the Caspian coast across 1972 and 1973, interrupted by unplanned halts and financial trouble. The film premiered on December 1, 1974, at the third Tehran International Film Festival.

A boat drifts out of the fog onto the shore of a village. Rana, who has waited a year for a husband lost at sea, hopes it has brought him back. But its only passenger is a wounded man named Ayat, who remembers nothing of his past except the certainty that his attackers are still after him and will one day come out of that same fog. The village takes him in, on the condition that he marry a local woman. Ayat chooses Rana, and from there begin the resistance and a series of trials.

Three critics, from three parts of the world, have looked at this film from three angles.

The film's place in world cinema

Richard Brody in The New Yorker approaches the film from the perspective of its place in world cinema. He calls it one of the most distinctive recent rediscoveries of international cinema, and writes that it is at once a passionate romance and a teeming action film, uniting history and legend, anthropology and mysticism. Imogen Sara Smith in Film Comment, introducing the Revivals section of the New York Film Festival, describes it as an otherworldly, cryptic and visceral treatment of the archetypal story of a stranger who comes to town, and places it within a thematic thread on immigration and displacement.

Ritual, and what ritual cannot do

Shahram Ashraf Abyaneh in Tehran approaches the film through the lens of ritual. In July 2025, at a screening of the restored version at the Iranian Artists Forum cinematheque, he said the entire story is bound to ritual: the film's circular forms, the gatherings that assemble around a circle, are signs of stasis and tradition, and the revolving camera and circular staging come from Iranian ritual theatre. He pointed to the image of Rana, who after her husband's death tears her white dress to reveal black beneath it; in that moment she is not only mourning but readying herself to fight. His conclusion was direct: the film is full of ceremonies, mourning and weddings and prayer and chain-beating, and the people, faced with a threat, take refuge in ritual instead of acting. Beyzaie's point, he argued, is that ritual alone is not enough, that one must decide and act; a people who have taken shelter behind their rituals through centuries of invasion are sometimes made passive by those very rituals.

The scythe, the wound, the torn collar

Parviz Jahed, writing in the Toronto magazine Phoenix, reads the film through its system of signs. He treats the bloodied scythe Ayat brings with him from the sea as the key to the film: the scythe is a harvesting tool, a symbol of the bond with the earth and with life, and the blood on it turns it into a sign of killing. He then notes that the same scythes appear later in the hands of the unknown men who come to kill Ayat; victim and killer carry the same instrument. Jahed also reads the women's tearing of their collars as more than a sign of grief, calling it a moment of revolt and of breaking silence, in a world where women can cry out only through ritual and through their own bodies. He identifies the film's visual sources as well: Kurosawa in Seven Samurai, Yojimbo and The Hidden Fortress; Mizoguchi in Ugetsu, a film Beyzaie loved; and the choreography of Miklós Jancsó in open landscapes.

Jahed clarifies something that helps explain the film's initial reception. Beyzaie made The Stranger and the Fog at a time when the dominant discourse among Iranian intellectuals turned on a return to the self and on nativism, and unlike many of his generation he refused to reduce that concern to a slogan or an ideology.

The first reception was not uniform. At the Tehran festival some critics praised the film's technical sophistication, but the broader Iranian critical response remained muted; in those years leftist film criticism favored explicitly social and political narratives. Javad Mojabi wrote about the film in the newspaper Ettela'at on December 5, 1974. A year later it won a special award at the Cairo festival.

As for whether the film was prophetic, Beyzaie's own words are shorter than any interpretation. He said that The Stranger and the Fog, or at least some of its essential images, came out of his own nightmares.

After the 1979 revolution, The Stranger and the Fog was banned for decades and was effectively impossible to see. In all the years since, Beyzaie was able to make only six features, several of which never received a screening permit. Ballad of Tara and Death of Yazdgerd went years without permission to be shown. In 2010 he left Iran at the invitation of Stanford University, and did not return.

Beyzaie himself said, in an interview with the magazine Andisheh-ye Pouya, that he did not think leaving Iran had cost him any important opportunity. What he lost, he said, was a lifetime spent waiting to be told no, and the work that was left undone because of it.

The film was restored in 4K from the original negative by The Film Foundation's World Cinema Project in collaboration with Cineteca di Bologna, with Beyzaie himself supervising the color grading. The restoration premiered on September 30, 2023, at the New York Film Festival and has traveled through cinematheques and festivals since.

Half a century later, a film once dismissed by some as remote from reality returns to Los Angeles screens in tribute to a filmmaker who spent the final fifteen years of his life in the very country where those films are now being shown.

Film details

Title: The Stranger and the Fog (Gharibeh va Meh)
Director: Bahram Beyzaie
Screenplay: Bahram Beyzaie
Editing: Bahram Beyzaie
Cast: Khosrow Shojazadeh, Parvaneh Massoumi, Manuchehr Farid, Esmat Safavi, Vali Shirandami, Sami Tahassoni, Reza Yaghouti, Esmail Pourreza
Cinematography: Mehrdad Fakhimi, Parviz Malekzadeh, Firouz Malekzadeh
Producer: Mohammad Taghi Shokraee
Production companies: Rex Cinema and Theatre Company, Compagnie de Cinema
Language: Persian
Country: Iran
Running time: 140 minutes
Shot in: Asalem, Caspian coast, 1972 and 1973
Premiere: December 1, 1974, third Tehran International Film Festival
Award: Special award, Cairo International Film Festival, 1975
Restoration: 4K from the original negative, The Film Foundation's World Cinema Project with Cineteca di Bologna, color grading supervised by Beyzaie
Restored premiere: September 30, 2023, New York Film Festival