At the border between feature film and documentary, the works of Fereydoun Rahnema, Parviz Kimiavi, and Nasser Taghvai, pioneers of Iran’s New Wave cinema, engage in distinct ways with the political and intellectual crisis of the period leading up to the 1979 Islamic Revolution. One feature they share, however, is a focus on marginal, existentially unstable figures. In this paper, I argue that possession and haunting in Rahnema, Kimiavi, and Taghvai can be read as symptoms of a porous, temporal self who rejects the state-sponsored call for a sovereign, enlightened, national subject. In Taghvai’s "Wind of Jinn" (1969) the Black practitioners of zar occupy a liminal space that is animated by the pain of an unspoken yet ever-present historical trauma; in Kimiavi’s "P like Pelican" (1972) and "The Stone Garden" (1976), the mystical inner worlds of the protagonists stand as counterdrafts to the social and economic strictures of their time; and in Rahnema’s "Siavash in Persepolis" (1965), figures with indeterminate roots, belonging neither to past or present, reality or fiction, seem to be staging Ferdowsi's Book of Kings. Storytelling here becomes an act that passes through a contingent self and thus depends on a moment of relation, rooted in time: it is a haunting of the present by the past. Drawing on the thought of Michel de Certeau, Stefania Pandolfo, and Adriana Cavarero, my paper explores the meaning of selfhood and alterity in key works of the Iranian New Wave. Ultimately, I ask whether the “internal other” of Iran’s modernization drive of the 1960s and 1970s is not also the Other of modernity itself.