The judiciary reported on Sunday that one of Iran’s most prominent filmmakers, Dariush Mehrjui, was stabbed to death on Saturday night with his wife at their house outside of Tehran.
A pioneer of the Iranian new wave of cinema, the 83-year-old was irrevocably linked to it after directing “The Cow” in 1969, one of the movement’s earliest works.
“During the preliminary investigation, we found that Dariush Mehrjui and his wife, Vahideh Mohammadifar, were killed by multiple stab wound to the neck,” said Hossein Fazeli-Harikandi, chief justice of Alborz province, near Tehran, according to Mizan online news agency.
In an interview published on Sunday by the newspaper Etemad, the film-maker’s wife said that she had been threatened and their home had been burgled.
“The investigation revealed that no complaints had been filed regarding the illegal entry into the Mehrjui’s family villa and the theft of their belongings”, said Fazeli-Harikandi.
Dariush Mehrjui’s most notable films, alongside “The Cow”, included “Mr Gullible” (1970), “The Cycle” (1977), “The Tenants” (1987), “Hamoun” (1990), “Sara” (1993), “Pari” (1995) and “Leila” (1997).
At a memorial Mehrjui attended, the films were all shown at Paris’ Forum des Images.
The filmmaker produced the 1983 documentary “Journey to the Land of Rimbaud” while residing in France from 1980 to 1985.
On returning to Iran, he triumphed at the box office with “The Tenants”.
In 1990, he directed “Hamoun”, a dark comedy showing 24 hours in the life of an intellectual tormented by his divorce and his intellectual anxieties in an Iran overwhelmed by the technology companies Sony and Toshiba.
Throughout the 1990s, Mehrjui also depicted the lives of women in “Sara”, “Pari” and “Leila”, a melodrama about an infertile woman who encourages her husband to marry a second woman.
