2023-10-15 12:26:06
The director of The Cow, who contributed to the international recognition of Iranian cinema, was killed Saturday evening at his home with his wife.
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. He notably made in 1969 The cowone of the first films of his country’s new wave of cinema and awarded the jury prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1971. His wife Vahideh Mohammadifar, who was 54, was also a screenwriter and set designer.
“During the preliminary investigation, we found that Dariush Mehrjui and his wife were 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.
The Minister of Culture, Mohammad-Mehdi Esmaïli, declared in a press release that he had requested “clarification on the circumstances of this sad and painful incident“. Daily life Advances 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 complaints have been filed regarding illegal intrusion into the Mehrjui family villa and theft of their property», Specified Mr. Fazeli-Harikandi.
Social comedies
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 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 33, a 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) et Hamoun (1990). After the Islamic revolution of 1979, Dariush Mehrjui stayed in France for a few years, where he made the docu-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 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 the technology companies Sony and Toshiba. Over the next decade, Dariush Mehrjui painted portraits of women in films Sara, Pari et Leilathe latter being a melodrama with the 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.
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