Impossible to see for decades, Bahram Beyzaie’s dazzling The Stranger and the Fog, about Ayat, the titular stranger who arrives, bloodied, bruised, and amnesiac, to an isolated fishing village on a drifting boat, is an endlessly symbolic tale in which uncontrollable forces of nature, superstition, ritual, and violence disorient the viewer in exhilarating ways, now presented in a new digital restoration from the original camera negative.

As Ayat recuperates, he marries a local widow, despite resistance from the community. Years later, a group of armed men come in search of Ayat.

Notes by David O’Mahony