One of the most important Iranian filmmakers, Dariush Mehrjui, was stabbed to death on Saturday, October 14, with his wife, Vahideh Mohammadifar, at their home near Tehran, the Judicial Authority announced on Sunday.
Aged 83, the filmmaker directed The Cow in 1969, one of the first films of the new wave of Iranian cinema.
“During the preliminary investigation, we found that Dariush Mehrjui and his wife (…) had been killed by multiple stab wounds to the neck,” announced the head of justice of the province of Alborz, close to Tehran, Hossein Fazeli-Harikandi, quoted by the Mizan Online news agency.
In an interview published on Sunday by the newspaper Etemad, the filmmaker’s wife declared that she had recently been threatened by an individual and that their home had been burglarized.
“The investigation showed that no complaints were filed regarding the illegal entry into the Mehrjui family villa and the theft of their property,” Fazeli-Harikandi said.
Black comedies and melodramas
Between 1980 and 1985, the filmmaker stayed in France, where he directed Rimbaud’s Le Voyage au pays.
Back in Iran, he triumphed at the box office with The Tenants (1987). In 1990, he signed Hamoun, a black comedy about the twenty-four hours in the life of an intellectual anguished by his divorce and his intellectual concerns, in an Iran invaded by the technology companies Sony and Toshiba.
In the 1990s, Dariush Mehrjui also painted portraits of women, including Sara (1993), Pari (1995) and Leila (1996), a melodrama about a barren woman who encourages her husband to marry a second wife. These films were screened in 2014, by the Forum des images, in Paris, during a tribute in his presence.