News

Exclusive: The mythical feature was restored by Janus Films and Martin Scorsese's The Film Foundation.

Bahrām Beyzaie‘s iconic feature “The Stranger and the Fog” is celebrating its 50th anniversary with a 4K restoration.

The Iranian New Wave filmmaker released his sophomore film, also titled “Gharibeh va Meh,” in 1974. 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 official synopsis reads: “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.”

Manouchehr Farid also stars.

The restoration was made possible by Martin Scorsese’s The Film Foundation through its World Cinema Project, along with Cineteca di Bologna in collaboration with writer/director Beyzaie. The funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. The digital restoration is courtesy of Janus Films, which is distributing the film theatrically.

Beyzaie’s follow-up feature “The Ballad of Tara” was banned in Iran upon its 1979 release. Other films include “Bashu, the Little Stranger” and his debut “Downpour,” which ushered in the New Wave. “Downpour” was added to the Criterion Collection in 2020 through Scorsese’s World Cinema Project selections. “Bashu, the Little Stranger” also received a re-release in Tehran theaters in 2015.

Beyzaie is also known for “When We Are All Asleep” and “Killing Mad Dogs.” He was inducted as an Academy member in 2024. Since 2010, Beyzai has taught at Stanford University as a Daryabari Visiting Professor of Iranian Studies; the filmmaker teaches courses in Persian theatre, cinema, and mythology, and has directed several plays, such as his nine-hour-long “Tarabnameh.”

Criterion and Janus Films are both owned by Indian Paintbrush founder Steven Rales. Indian Paintbrush also owns Galerie, an online film club and subscription service that launched in November 2023 with auteur curators like Wes Anderson, Pablo Larraín, Mike Mills, and Karyn Kusama as guest programmers.

“The Stranger and the Fog” 4K restoration premieres August 30 in New York at Film at Lincoln Center, with a national rollout to follow courtesy of Janus Films. Check out the trailer below.

Most audience members probably haven't sat down to watch a film and thought, "Wow, imagine if this film weren't here anymore." Sadly, that can be the case, particularly with older films. The Mountain Eagle, the second film Alfred Hitchcock made, has been lost to the scourge of time. So, too, has The Patriot, an Ernst Lubitsch film from 1928 that was nominated for Best Picture. The most famous example is Jerry Lewis' 1972 Holocaust film The Day the Clown Cried, unseen by audiences not by luck but because Lewis was ashamed of his work and refused to let the film see the light of day. Then, there are films presumed lost but that have eventually been found. Carl Theodor Dreyer's totemic The Passion of Joan of Arc of 1928 was an incomplete film until a full, original copy was found in 1981 by a cleaner in a Norwegian mental institution. Metropolis, the magnificent and highly influential science fiction film from 1927 by Fritz Lang, only had its complete version discovered in 2008 in Argentina. And we wouldn't even have Toy Story 2 after a computer bug wiped most of Pixar's servers if it weren't for one technical director having a backup copy on their home hard drive.

There is one more dramatic reason we have a certain film to watch nowadays: the last surviving copy was snuck out of its country during a coup d'état.Law of the Border is a 1966 dramatic western from Turkey whose survival today is down to a few hardy fans who sought to preserve the film for its artistic merits. The Turkish government was cracking down on artistic productions with a political edge, including Law of the Border. The background to this film seems more like a film by Costa-Gavras than anything else. The film's star, Yılmaz Güney, fled the country in the 1970s after he was convicted of murdering a judge, and so his films were sought for destruction. He was also a controversial figure in Turkey because he was of Kurdish origin. His supporters helped smuggle the last extant copy of the film out of the country, and it remained in Europe safe from Turkish authorities until it was picked up for restoration by the World Cinema Project, Cannes Film Festival in 2011, which is no surprise as this little film packs a significant punch with a serious political message underneath.

Why Did They Want to Destroy 'Law of the Border'?

Turkey has often, unfortunately, been a country that has suffered from political unrest and violence. The 1960s and 1970s in the country were marked by significant turmoil, characterized by military coups, political instability, and social upheaval. The decade began with the 1960 military coup, which overthrew the democratically elected government, leading to a period of military rule and the execution of Prime Minister Adnan Menderes in 1961. The 1970s saw a rise in political violence, with clashes between leftist and rightist groups, labor strikes, and student protests. Economic difficulties and social inequality fueled widespread discontent, further destabilizing the political landscape. This period of unrest culminated in the 1980 military coup, which aimed to restore order but led to severe repression, human rights abuses, and the establishment of a repressive military regime.

It was in this world that Law of the Border was born, emerging in 1966, from director Lütfi Ömer Akad. His oeuvre focused on social realism more than anything, depicting Turkish life as it was. He was never involved in political turmoil, but Law of the Border brought him as close to that as possible because of its star. Güney. He had always been involved in leftist causes during his emergence as an actor and filmmaker, with his films of urban poverty and hopelessness drawing the vicious attention of the Turkish censors. His films stylistically took influence from the Italian neo-realism popularized by Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica in the 1940s and 1950s.

Güney was arrested and imprisoned for a week in 1971, thus leaving Istanbul to move inland away from the authorities that sought to put an end to his career. He was arrested the following year and imprisoned for two years. After release, Güney made two more films before being arrested for the murder of a conservative judge, a charge against which he always maintained his innocence. During this imprisonment, Güney wrote scripts for The Herd and Pol, and the latter won the Palme d'Or at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival. He was able to attend this award ceremony because he escaped from prison by, apparently, walking out the front door. Not quite a Clint Eastwood prison break, then. Güney's films were characterized similarly by their social realism and depiction of impoverished people, often subliminally criticizing the powers that be. His work was ordered to be destroyed, but one ardent supporter found a copy of Law of the Border and snuck it across the border, thus preserving the film for posterity.

So, What is 'Law of the Border' About?

Hıdır's life takes a turn when an old friend, a teacher named Ali (Pervin Par), arrives in the village. Ali tries to convince Hıdır and the villagers to abandon smuggling and seek legitimate livelihood, believing that education and honest work can offer a way out of their dire circumstances. Despite his respect for Ali, Hıdır is skeptical. The local police, led by a harsh and corrupt commander, intensify their efforts to stamp out smuggling. The villagers, including Hıdır, are caught between the relentless pressure from the authorities and their desperate need to provide for their families.

Tragedy strikes when Hıdır's son is killed in a skirmish between the smugglers and the police. Devastated and driven by a desire for justice, Hıdır takes a stand. He joins forces with Ali and other villagers to confront the authorities and demand better conditions and opportunities for their community. The climax of the film is a powerful confrontation between the villagers and the government forces, highlighting the themes of resistance, sacrifice, and the quest for dignity. Hıdır's transformation from a resigned smuggler to a determined leader, quite similar to the plot of one of Akira Kurosawa's best films, symbolizes the broader struggle of the oppressed against systemic injustice.

Is 'Law of the Border' Any Good?

Absolutely. Law of the Border is a hearty, intense Western-style film about a desperate father who will stop at nothing to do what's right for his children, like Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird or Chris Gardner in The Pursuit of Happyness. The film's realistic portrayal of life in a border village captures the struggles and resilience of its characters, making the narrative compelling and having a greater impact at an emotional level. Güney's performance as Hıdır is praised for its depth and realism. His portrayal brings a strong emotional resonance to the film, supported by a more than capable cast. The stand he takes against local police corruption isn't dissimilar from that taken by a masked English vigilante in the near future.

Akad's direction, combined with Ali Uğur's bracing, harsh cinematography, creates a visually striking and immersive experience. The use of the stark landscape enhances the film's themes and mood. It is very reminiscent of The Great Silence, one of the great European spaghetti Westerns from the 1960s, in how it depicts barrenness and deserted space. The powerlessness the local villagers feel is reflected in the desolate nature of their landscape and the world. The film addresses significant social issues such as poverty, oppression, and the impact of government policies on marginalized communities. Its critical perspective on systemic injustices adds layers of meaning and relevance. Law of the Border chooses to stand up against its societal system, even if the creators were painfully aware of the consequences of their actions.

What is the Legacy of 'Law of the Border'?

Law of the Border paved the way for Turkish cinema, landing it on the world stage and letting all other corners of the cinephilic world know Turkish cinema was arriving. It is a landmark in Turkish cinema, representing a shift towards more socially conscious filmmaking. It played a pivotal role in the careers of Akad and Güney, who are key figures in Turkish film history and whose successes have opened the doors to artists like Nuri Bilge Ceylan, whose 2014 film Winter Sleep too won the Palme d'Or. Turkish films are being produced by Netflix and are appearing on screens worldwide now, all thanks to Akad and Güney.

The background story to Law of the Border is almost as interesting as the film itself, but don't let that take anything away from the film. It can be tough to find because the restoration by the World Cinema Project was only able to do so much, working off the scratched and damaged copy of the film that was snuck out of the country. It is screened at retrospectives, film festivals, university film clubs, and art-house cinemas. The Criterion Collection also released the film on DVD as a double feature with Edward Yang'sTaipei Story. It is worth mentioning that copies of the film can be requested from the World Cinema Project's website, which it must be said is a fantastic initiative and a brilliant way to bring these smaller, lesser-known films to wider audiences.

Any fan of cinema who likes to explore new horizons will get a lot out of Law of the Border and will discover for themselves the magical and fascinating world of Turkish cinema. The film is considered a must-watch for its powerful storytelling, strong performances, and significant social commentary, making it a highly regarded film in Turkish and international cinema. No fan who manages to view the film will regret it. It is these exact films that can make us all remember why we love the art form in the first place.

Law of the Border is available to watch on The Criterion Channel in the U.S.

Representatives from Martin Scorsese's Film Foundation and Warner Bros. talk about their collaboration on the new restoration set to screen at Tribeca.

On June 12, the Tribeca Film Festival will present the East Coast premiere of a new restoration of Alfred Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest,” screening in glorious 70mm thanks to Warner Bros. and Martin Scorsese‘s Film Foundation. It’s just the latest in an ongoing series of collaborations between the studio and the foundation, whose 70mm upgrade of John Ford’s “The Searchers” also premiered this year. Both films now look better than they have since their initial theatrical releases thanks to the studio going back to the original VistaVision negatives and taking full advantage of that format’s increased resolution to create the most detailed, vivid masters of Hitchcock and Ford’s classics possible.

When VistaVision was introduced in 1954 alongside other new formats like CinemaScope and Cinerama (all of which were intended to bring back the movie audience that had migrated to television), what made it special was that it had double the negative size of a typical 35mm frame. “With CinemaScope, you have a four-perf negative,” the Film Foundation‘s Margaret Bodde told IndieWire. “VistaVision is eight-perf, so you’re doubling the size of the image. It just has a superior image quality.” That added quality is what justified creating a 70mm exhibition print from the studio’s perspective. “The goal was to get all the resolution that you possibly could onto that frame,” Warner Bros. executive Daphne Dentz told IndieWire.

The unusual nature of VistaVision’s eight-perf, horizontal negative created challenges for the restoration team, the first of which was simply scanning the image at the highest resolution possible. Warner Bros. scanned the negative at 13K, with each half of the VistaVision frame scanned at 6.5K and stitched together digitally. According to colorist Sheri Eisenberg, that led to some unique issues. “With VistaVision, two frames make up the one image, and you get what I call Vista flicker,” Eisenberg told IndieWire. “You have each frame aging in its own way, so you can get a little bit of flicker across the two frames. Then you add the fact that this is really a special effects movie — there are layers of opticals and practicals and artwork mixed in with live action. All of these different elements had faded differently in different ways.”

For Eisenberg, the biggest challenge was that the color in the original negative had faded considerably. “The negative had extreme fading in the blue-yellow channel,” she said. “That makes it very difficult to render natural images.” In order to get a reference for the way the film’s color would have looked on its initial release, Eisenberg screened a copy borrowed from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that had physical wear and tear but intact color because it was printed in IB Technicolor, which doesn’t fade. That gave her a starting point for a new HDR color pass that brought cinematographer Robert Burks’ gorgeous images back to vivid life.

The fact that “North by Northwest” is so beloved made restoring it an obvious choice and a necessity. “Because Hitchcock was such a popular filmmaker, you run the risk of the original negative being used to make more prints and getting a little more beat up than a film that wasn’t so commercially successful,” Bodde said. Dentz added that in addition to the color dye instability issues there were other problems typical for an original camera negative of this age. “The OCN also suffered from film shrinkage,” she said, “and the abnormal amount made it hard to keep a stable image.”

In addition to stabilizing the image and restoring the color, the studio and Film Foundation supervised a new soundtrack in which mixer Doug Mountain took the original mono stems and created a new 5.1 audio mix. That mix was then encoded in DTS for the 70mm print that will be screening at Tribeca and then traveling around the world to other venues, such as the American Cinematheque’s Egyptian Theatre in Los Angeles. “It’s going to multiple festivals,” Eisenberg said. “I know it’s going to open in Bologna. I feel like whenever we do these films, there’s an opportunity for a whole new generation to get to see the film theatrically. Audiences have a bit of a love affair with seeing film on film, and that’s really what we’re trying to do here: preserve it for future generations and present something special for everybody right now.”

The 70mm “North by Northwest” will have its East Coast Premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival on Wednesday, June 12.

Martin Scorsese and archivists from the Library of Congress, UCLA, MOMA, and elsewhere tell Indiewire why it's important not to leave film behind in the digital age.

A highlight of 2024’s TCM Classic Film Festival was the world premiere of a pristine restoration of John Ford‘s “The Searchers,” one of the greatest Westerns ever made and certainly — given its impact on directors like Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, and Paul Schrader — one of the most influential. “The Searchers” was photographed in VistaVision, arguably the best of the widescreen formats that emerged in the 1950s to combat television’s encroachment on the film business, and to see it projected on the big screen is a transcendent experience — especially if one is lucky enough to view the 70mm print that premiered at TCM’s fest and is currently making its way around the revival circuit (it screens in Los Angeles at the American Cinematheque on May 3 and 4).

The 70mm print is the end result of a meticulous restoration project overseen by Warner Brothers Discovery and Scorsese’s Film Foundation, who went back to the 8-perf VistaVision camera negative to preserve every bit of detail and beauty in Ford’s original frames. For Scorsese, keeping the experience of viewing a film like “The Searchers” on celluloid alive is a crucial part of the Film Foundation’s work. “The majority of all the films ever made were shot and finished on film — and there are still many people, myself included, who shoot on film,” Scorsese told IndieWire. “For the artists who made the pictures we love, the ones at the heart of cinema history, film was their canvas and their brush, their paper and their pen, the material that they handled and held up to the light, cut and spliced, and watched passing through a constant beam of light 24 times per second. It was how they created the art of cinema. So, film itself is still vital to restoration and crucial to preservation.”

Like most restorations these days, “The Searchers” benefited from a combination of photochemical and digital technologies. “It’s no longer a matter of film versus digital,” Greg Lukow, who runs the Library of Congress’ National Audio-Visual Conservation Center, told IndieWire. “That kind of thinking needs to go by the wayside. It’s really a matter of film and digital.” As Rajendra Roy of the Museum of Modern Art pointed out, “Current restorations generally are a combination of digital and analog processes: scanning film materials, digitally editing, integrating and cleaning the images, outputting to DCPs and in some cases 35mm prints. We’ve embraced the digital era while not leaving celluloid behind.”

Most archivists agree, however, that when it comes to preserving classic films, celluloid is still the ideal. “Film stock remains the most stable medium for long-term preservation,” Jeff Lambert of the National Film Preservation Association told IndieWire. “Storage is one of the most important reasons to continue to preserve and archive films on film stock. Stored in cold, dry conditions, contemporary film stocks will last hundreds of years. It is cost-effective and, once properly archived, requires little more than climate monitoring and scheduled inspections. For restoration, digital methods can be amazing tools, but for long-term preservation, analog film remains the standard for reasons both financial and practical.”

Margaret Bodde, executive director of the Film Foundation, agreed with Lambert’s point about the cost-effectiveness of film preservation. “While there may be a hefty upfront cost to preserve film on film, with digital, there’s a longer-term cost of constant migration,” Bodde told IndieWire, adding that the stability of celluloid is remarkable compared to digital formats, whose durability is still questionable given that film has been around for around a hundred years longer. “We have films from the earliest years of cinema. You can take a film strip, hold it up to light, and see the images. You can still project it. You can still put it on a flatbed and take a look at it. You don’t have any roadblocks to being able to see what is on that film. The ideal is that there’s temperature and humidity control, and that films are being inspected and cared for. But there are many, many instances of films that have been dug up from places like bomb shelters in England — they have mold on them, but you can still see that image.”

May Hong HaDuong of the UCLA Film and Television Archive concurs. “Properly stored, film can have the lifespan of paper as an archival medium, lasting hundreds of years,” she told IndieWire. “Compared to LTO tape, which has a lifespan of 15-30 years, the long-term preservation benefit of film is still unmatched. Digital preservation requires ongoing stewardship and infrastructure to ensure the integrity and health of the files created. At the end of the day — or rather, at the end of a century — the film is still recognizable.” “Digital storage mediums are costly and less reliable,” Lambert added. “Films can be stored on a hard drive, but a backup is also necessary. Constantly changing digital formats creates conundrums regarding data migration and backup plans. Instead of storing a new film negative and keeping it safe in a vault, digital asset management can be a complicated and expensive proposition.”

That said, Lukow points out that digital preservation is far more reliable at this point than many people understand, emphasizing that pieces like a recent Hollywood Reporter article on the dangers of “decaying” digital files are needlessly alarmist. “That was a lede 15 years ago,” Lukow said, noting that robotic data tape libraries, which are neither online nor totally offline, ensure that footage will not be corrupted or lost. “When our files are ingested or migrated, there are SHA-1 verifying and checksumming procedures to make sure that nothing ever goes wrong, so we feel very comfortable with our digital preservation infrastructure at the petabyte level, and I know several of the studios do as well.” Lukow is more concerned with independent filmmakers who are struggling to get their movies finished and out into the world. “They’re preparing their films for festivals, and once those festivals are over, they don’t have the resources to put attention into a proper celluloid or digital preservation.”

Bodde says that independent filmmakers should migrate their files at least once a year and make sure that they always have multiple copies in case a drive crashes; she adds that there are also relatively low-cost ways of making celluloid prints such as the Cinevator, a machine that scans digital files and outputs to 35mm positive stock. “I’m not saying that everyone should go out and do that, but you need to be conscientious,” Bodde said, adding that the Film Foundation’s website has DIY preservation guidelines for independent filmmakers. “If your film is on a streaming platform, as we all know, the platform can decide to take it down all of a sudden and you’ll discover your film is not there. Then you’re faced with trying to get your film back out there, and sometimes time is of the essence and if you haven’t already taken care of it, you can put yourself in a stressful situation trying to track your elements down.”

Lukow says that for archivists who are committed to preserving film as film, one of the great challenges — and one of his biggest concerns — is simply the dearth of laboratories that can do the work. “We built what will probably be the last wet photochemical archival preservation lab in the United States,” he said. “There are only three of us left: the Library of Congress, FotoKem, which is basically the only lab servicing the industry, and a boutique lab in Rockville, Maryland called Colorlab.” While filmmakers like Scorsese, Christopher Nolan, and Quentin Tarantino have helped keep film alive by continuing to shoot on celluloid and, in some cases, insisting on 35mm or 70mm exhibition, that only takes care of the capture and projection side of the celluloid infrastructure — in terms of preservation, it’s important to keep not only film stock alive, but also the laboratories that can do the work. “There are vendors that support the photochemical equipment infrastructure that have gone out of business, and I don’t see them coming back,” Lukow said.

Yet the hunger for film exhibition is, if anything, at its peak among cinephiles, with theaters like Quentin Tarantino’s New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles, Metrograph and Film Forum in New York, and hundreds of others around the world drawing large audiences for 35mm presentations. Making sure those audiences see movies that look as close to their makers’ original intentions as possible remains a primary goal of preservationists, and a key argument for preserving and archiving on celluloid. “Finding the source material for any film is critical in a restoration process,” Roy said. “Every generational reproduction represents a step away from the original. By the time you get to contemporary digital versions of an old movie, you risk creating a version that has little to no resemblance to the original.”

Indeed, Bodde says that one of the challenges of restoration in the digital age is making sure one doesn’t deviate from a film’s original aesthetic. “There’s a lot you can do with digital, so it’s an exercise in restraint,” she said. “You don’t want to take it to the point where you’ve removed every nuance of the grain — the actual nature of the film should still come through.” As a matter of policy, even when restoration work has a digital workflow the Film Foundation always outputs to film at the end, both for preservation purposes and to make the movies available to filmgoers who want to see them projected in their original format. “There are a lot of archives, museums, and repertory theaters that want to present film, and audiences will come out for that. It’s a way of continuing that engagement and dialogue with the audience, especially with younger generations.” Roy concluded, “We place so much value on the vision of the artist, and preserving film is the best way to ensure that future technological advances are able to represent that vision. And let’s face it, movies still just look better shot and projected on film!”