Dariush Mehrjui, considered one of the greatest representatives of Iranian cinema, was stabbed to death along with his wife in their home near Tehran on Saturday evening. Iranian authorities have not yet reported any arrests.
Published on: October 15, 2023 – 2:11 p.m
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Iranian director Dariush Mehrjui was stabbed to death along with his wife at their home near Tehran on Saturday evening, after a long career that contributed to the international recognition of Iranian cinema.
The circumstances of this double murder remained mysterious as of Sunday, October 15, as Iranian authorities had reported no arrests.
The 83-year-old Dariush Mehrjui is considered one of the greatest exponents of Iranian cinema as a director, producer and screenwriter in six decades during which he was subjected to censorship before and after the 1979 Islamic revolution.
In particular, in 1969 he directed “The Cow”, one of the first films of the new wave of cinema in his country, which won the Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1971.
His wife Vahideh Mohammadifar, 54, was also a screenwriter and set designer.
“Multiple stab wounds to the neck”
“During the preliminary investigation, we discovered that Dariush Mehrjui and his wife had been killed by multiple stab wounds to the neck,” said the judicial chief of Alborz province, west of Tehran, Hossein Fazeli-Harikandi, quoted by Mizan Online agency.
He explained that at around 9 p.m., the filmmaker sent a message to his daughter Mona to invite her to dinner at her home in Karaj, a large city about 40 kilometers from the capital. When she arrived an hour and a half later, she found her parents’ bodies with fatal neck wounds.
Culture Minister Mohammad-Mehdi Esmaïli said in a statement that he had asked for “clarification on the circumstances of this sad and painful incident.”
The daily Etemad published on Sunday an interview with the filmmaker’s wife, in which she revealed that she had recently been threatened by a person and that her house had been broken into.
“No complaint has been filed regarding illegal entry into the Mehrjui family’s villa and theft of their property,” said Hossein Fazeli-Harikandi.
“Creator of Eternal Works”
In his press release, the culture minister paid tribute to “one of the pioneers of Iranian cinema” and “the creator of eternal works.”
Born in Tehran on December 8, 1939, Dariush Mehrjui studied philosophy in the United States before returning to Iran, where he founded a literary magazine and made his first film, “Diamond 33,” a parody of the James Bond films, in 1966. brought out.
He then made films with a strong social dimension, including “La Vache” (1969), “Monsieur le naïf” (1970) or “Le Cycle” (1974), “Les Tenants” (1987) and “Hamoun” (1990) . . ).
After the Islamic revolution of 1979, Dariush Mehrjui stayed in France for a few years, where he filmed the documentary fiction “Le Voyage au pays de Rimbaud”.
In addition to cinema, he translated works by the French writer Eugène Ionesco and the German Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse into Persian.
Back in Iran, he triumphed at the box office with “The Tenants” in 1987. Then in 1990 he signed Hamoun, a black comedy about the 24 hours in the life of an intellectual suffering from his divorce and his intellectual worries. in an Iran invaded by the technology companies Sony and Toshiba.
Over the next decade, Dariush Mehrjui portrayed women in the films Sara, Pari and Leila, the latter a melodrama starring actress Leila Hatami about an infertile woman who encourages her husband to marry a second wife.
“I was strongly influenced by Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni,” he explained in an interview with Iranian media. “I don’t make directly political films to promote a particular ideology or point of view. But everything is political (…) Cinema is like poetry that cannot take sides with anyone. Art must not become a propaganda tool,” he said.
Most of these often award-winning films were shown in his presence at the Forum des Images in Paris in 2014 as part of a tribute.
With AFP