Sunday, August 30, 2026 at 6:00 PM
Aero Theatre, Santa Monica
### **ABOUT THE FILMS:** **BASHU, THE LITTLE STRANGER, 1985, Dir. Bahram Beyzaie, 122 Mins, Film Movement, Iran** *In Gilaki, Arabic, and Persian with English subtitles.* Voted “the greatest Iranian film of all time” by Persian film magazine Picture House, writer/director Bahram Beyzaie’s BASHU, THE LITTLE STRANGER is a deeply humanist and poetic tale of empathy and compassion. With studied realism and lyrical artistry, the film resonates as a prophetic parable of life during wartime. During the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, a young boy named Bashu loses his family in a bombing raid on their home in Southern Iran. He escapes on a cargo truck headed to Northern Iran where he finds refuge with a farmer, Naii, and her two children. Despite the differences in their respective language and culture, the two form an indelible bond as they must face new challenges from Naii’s tight-knit community. FORMAT: DCP **THE STRANGER AND THE FOG, 1974, Dir. Bahram Beyzaie, 146 Mins, Janus Films, Iran** *In Persian with English subtitles.* Legendary Iranian New Wave director Bahram Beyzaie’s sophomore feature possesses both the epic dimensions of myth and the hallucinatory atmosphere of a dream. Set around the northern coast of Iran, THE STRANGER AND THE FOG begins with a boat drifting onto the shore of a small village. The beautiful Rana (Parvaneh Massoumi) hopes the stray vessel has brought back her husband, who disappeared a year ago out on the sea. But the only passenger is Ayat (Khosrow Shojazadeh), a wounded stranger with no memory of how he ended up in this land. After gradually proving himself as a member of the community, Ayat upsets the locals by marrying Rana, and then grows increasingly paranoid about intermittently glimpsed figures that vow to avenge his misdeeds from a forgotten past. 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. FORMAT: DCP