This paper examines the recurring figure of the stranger in Bahram Beyzai’s cinema through Sara Ahmed’s conceptualization of stranger fetishism. Focusing on how national identity and belonging are constructed through processes of encounters with embodied others, especially by analyzing Bashu, the Little Stranger, Ballad of Tara and The Stranger and the Fog, this paper explores the ways in which Beyzai’s films portray the stranger not as an unfamiliar outsider, but as that which we have already recognized as a “stranger” to the nation. Through close content and visual analyses, we argue that Beyzai’s work challenges notions of identity and strangeness, rendering how the stranger is an effect of processes of inclusion and expulsion, that constitute the boundaries of bodies and communities. Themes of movement and displacement in his films intersect with the concepts of home, homeland, and nationality, reopening the prior histories of encounter that fix and violate others in regimes of difference within dominant narratives of Iranian nation-state. This critical framework offers insights into the national imaginaries in pre- and post-revolutionary Iranian cinema, contributing to the broader discourses on identity formation through encounters with embodied others.