In a remote Iranian village, a boat arrives with a wounded man, Ayat, who has amnesia. Widow Ra'na is interested in him, causing family tensions. Villagers ask Ayat to marry, but he chooses Ra'na, leading to trouble.

Impossible to see for decades and presented in a new digital restoration from the original camera negative, The Stranger and the Fog is an endlessly symbolic tale in which uncontrollable forces of nature, superstition, ritual and violence disorient the viewer in exhilarating ways. In the film’s meticulously structured circular narrative, characters, times and spaces rhyme and mirror one another, turning filmmaking into an act of dreaming. Characters are the products of one another’s imaginations, and eventually all become myth. The film cedes the centre of both desire and control to a woman of will, breaking through the strictures of victimised women presented in many Iranian films of the 1970s.

Restored by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and Cineteca di Bologna in collaboration with Bahram Beyzaie. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.