Iranian director Dariush Mehrjui was stabbed to death with his wife on Saturday evening at their home near Tehran, after a long career which contributed to the international recognition of Iranian cinema.
The circumstances of this double murder remained mysterious at the end of Sunday, the Iranian authorities having reported no arrests.
Dariush Mehrjui, who was 83 years old, is considered one of the greatest exponents of Iranian cinema having been a director, producer and screenwriter for six decades during which he faced censorship before and after the 1979 Islamic Revolution .
He notably produced, in 1969, The cowone of the first films of the new wave of cinema in his country and rewarded in 1971 with the jury prize at the Venice Film Festival.
His wife Vahideh Mohammadifar, who was 54, was also a screenwriter and set designer.
The couple was “killed by multiple stab wounds to the neck”, announced the head of justice of Alborz province, west of Tehran, Hossein Fazeli-Harikandi.
He explained that the filmmaker had sent a message to his daughter Mona around 9 p.m. to invite her to dinner at their home in Karaj, a large town about 40 kilometers from the capital. When she arrived an hour and a half later, she found her parents’ bodies with fatal neck wounds.
Police said they found no evidence of a break-in in the house, but “clues were found that are likely linked to the murderer.”
The Minister of Culture, Mohammad-Mehdi Esmaïli, said he had requested “clarification on the circumstances of this sad and painful incident”.
Social comedies
The minister paid tribute to “one of the pioneers of Iranian cinema” and “the creator of eternal works”.
Born on December 8, 1939 in Tehran, Dariush Mehrjui studied philosophy in the United States before returning to Iran, where he launched a literary magazine and released his first film in 1966, Diamond 33a parody of the James Bond films.
He then made films with a strong social dimension, including The cow (1969), Mister naive (1970) or The cycle (1974), Tenants (1987) and Hamoun (1990).
After the Islamic revolution of 1979, Dariush Mehrjui spent a few years in France, where he produced documentary fiction The Journey to the Land of 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 Tenants in 1987. Then he signed in 1990 Hamouna black comedy about the 24 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.
Over the next decade, Dariush Mehrjui painted portraits of women in films Sarah, Bet And Leilathe latter being a melodrama starring actress Leila Hatami about a barren woman who encourages her husband to marry a second wife.
“I was greatly 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, which cannot take anyone’s side. Art must not become a propaganda tool,” according to him.
Often award-winning, most of these films were screened in 2014 at the Forum des Images in Paris, during a tribute in his presence.