Dariush Mehrjui, great Iranian filmmaker, stabbed to death in Tehran

Iranian director Dariush Mehrjui was stabbed to death on the evening of Saturday October 14 with his wife 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 on Sunday, with Iranian authorities reporting no arrests. Dariush Mehrjui, who was 83 years old, is considered one of the greatest representatives of Iranian cinema as a director, producer and screenwriter during six decades during which he faced censorship, before and after the Islamic revolution of 1979. In 1969, he notably directed The Cow, one of the first films of the new wave of cinema in his country and rewarded with the jury prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1971. His wife Vahideh Mohammadifar, who was 54 years old, was also screenwriter and set designer.

“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, west of Tehran, Hossein Fazeli-Harikandi, quoted by the Mizan Online agency. 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.

Culture Minister Mohammad-Mehdi Esmaïli said in a statement that he had requested “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 announced that she had recently been threatened by an individual and that their home had been burglarized. “No complaint has been filed regarding illegal intrusion into the Mehrjui family villa and theft of their property,” said Mr. Fazeli-Harikandi.

In his press release, the Minister of Culture paid tribute to “one of the pioneers of Iranian cinema” and “the creator of eternal works”. Born 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 33, a parody of the James Bond films. 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 spent a few years in France, where he directed the docu-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 anguished by his divorce and his intellectual concerns, in an Iran invaded by 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 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 everything is political (...) Cinema is like poetry, which cannot take sides with anyone. 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.