Tehran – Cinemathek of the Iranian Artist Forum (IAF) will be screening a restored version of the famous Iranian director and playwright’s 1974 film The Stranger and The Fog on Monday evening.
The screening is followed by a review session by Iranian critic Shahram Ashraf Abyaneh.
“The Stranger and the Fog” is a poetic, all-talented film that explores themes of identity, alienation and human condition through the mystical outsider’s story. The film opens in a remote coastal village where residents find boats approaching the coast. They pull the boat to land and find a tired, hurt stranger named Ayato (Hoslo Shohazadeh), who doesn’t remember what happened to him. What he remembers is that some people attacked him and he managed to escape. As Ayat stays in the village, he struggles to understand his identity and origins, fearing that his enemy is still behind him.
Rana (Parvane Masoumi), a woman whose fisherman’s husband dies at the sea, is interested in Ayat. She notices a bloody sickle he found in his boat, which has a strange mark, leading to doubt among the villagers. They decide to bring Ayat to trial, and he buries the sickle. Once trust is built, the villagers force Ayat to marry one of the village girls and choose Rana. Their union causes conflict, but Lana refuses to be alone forever.
Rana’s curiosity about Ayat intensifies and causes tension with his family, especially the brothers who protect their homes to catch Ayat. However, when Ayat enters the house, he secretly marries Rana after leaving behind a book. When he leaves her house in the morning, the villagers consider killing him, but instead unnoticed to the dark events looming in, they arrange a wedding.
Meanwhile, wolves attack the village, and two strangers arrive in the night to search for Ayat. He fights one of them after they try to abduct Lana and kill him. The bodies are transported to the sea by river and washed. Villagers interpret the return of the body as a sign of a fateful marriage separated from nature. Ayato later learns that one of the strangers is Rana’s missing husband. Lana secretly buries Ayato’s boat in the sand, but still worries about her pursuers.
Ayat becomes increasingly restless, worried about hunting him, becomes friends with the crippled boy and plans to build a house for him. One day a tall man in black arrived by boat, wandered the village, leaving his sickle, and heightened Ayat’s fear. The villagers dismiss him as merely a client, but Ayato and Rana are worried. The next day, five black men arrive to hunt Ayato, leading to a fierce conflict. Ayato decides to kill all five men, get on the boat and see what’s beyond the water, but Lana prepares for an uncertain future.
sab/