Noted Iranian Film Director, Wife Found Stabbed To Death At Home

Noted Iranian film director Dariush Mehrjui and his wife were stabbed to death in their home by an unknown assailant, state media reported Sunday.

The official IRNA news agency quoted Hossein Fazeli, a judiciary official, as saying that Mehrjhi and his wife, Vahideh Mohammadifar, were discovered dead with knife wounds in their necks.

Fazeli said the director’s daughter, Mona Mehrjui, found the bodies when she went to visit her father Saturday night at the home in a suburb about 30 kilometers (19 miles) west of the capital, Tehran.

The report said authorities were investigating and gave no speculation on a motive, though the wife had complained about a knife threat on social media in recent weeks.

Mehrjui , 83, was known as the cofounder of Iran’s film new wave in the early 1970s that mainly focused on realism. He received many awards, including a Silver Hugo from the Chicago International Film Festival in 1998 and a Golden Seashell at the San Sebastián International Film Festival in 1993.

Born on December 8, 1939, in Tehran, Dariush Mehrjui studied philosophy in the United States before his return to Iran where he launched a literary magazine and released his first film in 1967, “Diamond 33”, a parody of the James Bond series.

The 83-year-old was indelibly associated with the Iranian new wave of cinema, with his 1969 film “The Cow” one of the movement’s first pictures. He then directed a string of well-regarded films including “Mr Gullible” (1970), “The Cycle” (1977) before leaving Iran in the wake of the 1979 Islamic revolution.

Between 1980 and 1985, he lived in France where he worked on the documentary “Journey to the Land of Rimbaud” (1983). On returning to his homeland, he triumphed at the box office with “The Tenants” (1987). In 1990, he directed “Hamoun”, a dark comedy showing 24 hours in the life of an intellectual tormented by divorce and psychological anxieties in an Iran overwhelmed by the technology companies Sony and Toshiba.

Throughout the 1990s, Dariush Mehrjui also depicted the lives of women in “Sara” (1993), “Pari” (1995) and “Leila” (1997), a melodrama about an infertile woman who encourages her husband to marry a second woman.