Emerging from a long haze, Bahrām Beyzaie’s The Stranger and the Fog caught the right people’s eye when it appeared at last year’s New York Film Festival through a restoration overseen by the Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and Cineteca di Bologna in collaboration with the director himself. (Plus funding from none other than George Lucas.) The fortunes grow richer: Janus Films will begin a release on Friday, August 30 at Film at Lincoln Center, and now there’s a trailer suggesting a remarkable achievement finally brought to light.
Here’s the synopsis: “Legendary Iranian New Wave director Bahrām Beyzaie’s sophomore feature possesses both the epic dimensions of myth and the hallucinatory atmosphere of a dream. Set around the northern coast of Iran, The Stranger and the Fog begins with a boat drifting onto the shore of a small village. The beautiful Rana (Parvaneh Massoumi) hopes the stray vessel has brought back her husband, who disappeared a year ago out on the sea. But the only passenger is Ayat (Khosrow Shojazadeh), a wounded stranger with no memory of how he ended up in this land. After gradually proving himself as a member of the community, Ayat upsets the locals by marrying Rana, and then grows increasingly paranoid about intermittently glimpsed figures that vow to avenge his misdeeds from a forgotten past.”
Find preview and poster below:
