He is one of Iran's most important filmmakers. Dariush Mehrjui was stabbed to death on Saturday night with his wife at their home near Tehran, the Judiciary Authority said on Sunday.
The 83-year-old filmmaker made The Cow in 1969, one of the first films of the new wave of Iranian cinema.
"During the preliminary investigation, we found that Dariush Mehrjui and his wife, Vahideh Mohammadifar, were killed by multiple stab wounds to the neck," the head of justice in the province of Alborz, close to Tehran, Hossein Fazeli-Harikandi, was quoted as saying by the justice agency Mizan Online.
In an interview published on Sunday by the Etemad newspaper, the filmmaker's wife announced that she had recently been threatened by an individual and that their home had been burgled.
"The investigation showed that no complaint had been filed regarding the illegal entry into the Mehrjoui family's villa and the theft of their belongings," Fazeli-Harikandi added.
In France between 1980 and 1985
Dariush Mehrjui's films include The Cow (1969), Monsieur le naïf (1970), Le Cycle (1974), Les Locataires (1987), Hamoun (1990), Sara (1993), Pari (1995) and Leila (1996). These films were screened in 2014 by the Forum des Images in Paris, during a tribute in his presence.
Between 1980 and 1985, the filmmaker stayed in France where he directed Le Voyage au pays de Rimbaud.
Back in Iran, he triumphed at the box office with The Tenants. In 1990, he directed Hamoun, a black comedy about the 24 hours of the life of an intellectual anguished by his divorce and his intellectual worries, in an Iran invaded by the technological companies Sony and Toshiba.
In the 1990s, Dariush Mehrjui also painted portraits of women, including Sara, Pari and Leila, a melodrama about an infertile woman who encourages her husband to marry a second wife.