The Stranger and the Fog (Bahram Beyzaie, 1974)

Bahram Beyzaie on the set of The Stranger and the Fog

Impossible to see for decades, Bahram Beyzaie's dazzling The Stranger and the Fog, about a mysterious stranger arriving in a drifting boat to a coastal village and falling for a woman, is an endlessly symbolic tale in which ghosts of the past, narrow-minded villagers and forces beyond the controls of the characters take the viewer into a dizzying labyrinth of rituals. In the film's meticulously structured circular narrative, characters, times and spaces rhyme and mirror each other, turning filmmaking into an act of dreaming. Characters are the product of each other's imagination before turning into myth. The film gives the centre of both attention/desire and control to a woman of will therefore it goes beyond the confines of the victimised women of the 1970s Iranian cinema.

Gharibeh va Meh (The Stranger and the Fog). 1974. Iran. Written and directed by Bahram Beyzaie. With Parvaneh Massoumi, Khosrow Shojazadeh, Manouchehr Farid. DCP. 146 min. In Persian; English subtitles.