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 helped gain recognition for Iranian cinema abroad.
The local agency ISNA reported on Saturday evening, citing police, that four suspects had been identified, two of whom had been arrested. However, the circumstances of this double murder remained a mystery on Sunday.
The 83-year-old Dariush Mehrjui is considered one of the greatest representatives of Iranian cinema. He was a director, producer and screenwriter for six decades, struggling with censorship before and after the 1979 Islamic revolution.
In 1969 he made “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.
The couple was killed by numerous stab wounds to the neck, said the head of justice in Alborz province west of Tehran, Hossein Fazeli-Harikandi.
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 forty kilometers from the capital. When she arrived an hour and a half later, she discovered the bodies of her parents with fatal wounds to their necks.
One of the pioneers of Iranian cinema
Police said they found no signs of a break-in at the home, but did find clues likely linked to the killer.
Culture Minister Mohammad-Mehdi Esmaïli said he had asked for clarification on the circumstances of this sad and painful incident.
The minister paid tribute to one of the pioneers of Iranian cinema and a creator of eternal works.
Dariush Mehrjui was born in Tehran on December 8, 1939 and 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), Le Cycle (1974), Les Tenants (1987) and Hamoun (1990).
After the Islamic revolution of 1979, Dariush Mehrjui spent a few years in France, where he shot 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 technology companies Sony and Toshiba.
Portraits of women
Over the next decade, Dariush Mehrjui portrayed women in the films Sara, Pari and Leila, 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 it’s all politics […]. Cinema is like poetry that cannot take sides with anyone. Art should 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.