and    

 Present

Bahram Beyzaie’s

THE STRANGER AND THE FOG

A New 4K Restoration Premiere

Presented as part of the closing night of the Friend of the Fest 2024
with a special introduction by Cinema Rex’s Faran Moradi and Kaveh Mohebbi

Los Feliz Theater - Los Angeles

“A paranoid, prescient film of postrevolutionary Iran.”
~ Cahiers du Cinéma

“Thrillingly alien and vividly tactile.”
~ Film Comment

“Dripping with haunting imagery and violent interruptions.”
~ Screen Slate

Banned in Iran

ABOUT THE FILM

In Persian (Farsi) with English subtitles.

Legendary Iranian New Wave director Bahram 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.

FORMAT: DCP

DISTRIBUTOR: Janus Films

COUNTRY: Iran

ABOUT BAHRAM BEYZAIE

Bahram Beyzaie is an award-winning Iranian filmmaker, theater director, playwright, educator, and scholar of the history of Iranian theater. He was one of the leaders of the generation of filmmakers known as the Iranian New Wave, beginning in the late 1960s, and helped revitalize Iran's performing arts by incorporating Indo-Iranian mythology and Iranian conventional performing arts with modern theater and cinema. Over the past 50 years, Beyzaie has written numerous papers and published more than 70 books, monographs, plays, and screenplays. He has directed 14 staged plays, ten feature films, and four short films.

Beyzaie was the head of the Theater Arts Department at the University of Tehran for many years. His comprehensive book Theatre in Iran (1965) is considered an authoritative account of Iranian theater history. Since Beyzaie's arrival at Stanford University in 2010 as the Bita Daryabari Lecturer of Persian Studies, he has staged several plays and held workshops on Iranian mythology and cinema. He currently teaches courses on Iranian theater and cinema at Stanford.