Stranger and the Fog | Gharibe va Meh (1974)

Synopsis

Villagers find a wounded man in a boat that has drifted ashore. He knows his name and knows he has been attacked by a group of men, but Ayat cannot recollect his past.

He stays in the village and marries a young widow, Ra’na. Though he settles down to a happy life, he cannot get rid of the fear that he is being hunted.

One foggy day, a stranger appears by boat, walks about the village and leaves. Ayat does not have long to think about whether the man was among his pursuers, for the next day, five boats appear.



He flees with his wife and child, but the men catch up with him. In an ensuing bloody fight, the villagers manage to overcome the five men, but Ayat is wounded.

Just as he came, he returns to the sea, and getting into the boat he disappears into the fog.

The film was shown at the Third Tehran International Film Festival Competition Section in 1974 and the London Film Festival in 1975 and awarded the best cinematography prize at the First Cairo International Film Festival in 1976.

Cast: Parvaneh Massoumi, Khosrow Shojazadeh, Manuchehr Farid, Esmat Safavi, Sami Tahassoni, Valiollah Shirandami, Reza Yaghuti, Esmaeel Poor Reza, Mohammad Poursattar, Mohsen Mohammad Bagher, Ali Zhekan, Hamid Taati, Iraj Raminfar, Parviz Mahram, Mehdi Bahmanpoor, Majid Mozaffari


*****

Strranger and the Fog, which runs for nearly two-and-a-half hours and was some years in preparation, is an epic that owes allegiance to the Japanese cinema of Kurosawa.

It is set in some distant historical epock (unfamiliar even to Iranians), and centres on intolerence in a small seaside village. A stranger arrives in a boat. No one knows why or whence he comes.

After an initial period of suspicion, he is accepted by the villagers and marries a young widow.

But there is always the feeling that he is beintg pursued, and the climax of the film describes a running fight between the villagers and five mysterious armed men who come in search of the stranger.

The film is shot in colour with an arrogant ease; the camera travels swiftly and flently alongside running figures, and prowls unerrigly through the village huts.

This is a grandiose achievement, as successful in its depiction of a primitive life-style as Paradjanov's Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors.

It does not provide a window into contemporary Iranian culture, to be sure, but it does mark Bahram Beizai as one of his country's most gifted directors. -- IMDb
 

Read about this film

Country: Iran
Language: Farsi
Color: Color
Runtime: 140 min.