Iranian film director Dariush Mehrjui, winner of the San Sebastian Golden Shell, and his wife Vahideh Mohammadifar, were stabbed to death by unknown attackers, Iranian media reported this Sunday.
Judicial sources told the state agency IRNA that Mehrjui, 83, and Mohammadifar were discovered with stab wounds in the neck in their home in the city of Karaj, near Tehran.
The film director's daughter discovered the lifeless bodies on Saturday night and notified the Police, who are investigating the case.
"During the preliminary investigation we found that Dariush Mehrjui and his wife Vahideh Mohammadifar had been murdered by multiple stab wounds to the neck," declared the head of the judiciary of Alborz province, Hossein Fazeli-Harikandi, according to the Mizan justice agency. On-line.
In an interview published on Sunday by the newspaper Etemad, the filmmaker's wife stated that she had recently been threatened by an individual and that her home had been robbed.
Mehrjui was one of the founders of the new wave of Iranian cinema in the 1970s and his film The Cow is considered the initial work of this realist movement.
The filmmaker had an award-winning career, in which he obtained 49 national and international awards, according to the Mehr agency.
In 1993, she won the Golden Shell at the San Sebastián Film Festival for the feminist film Sara. The Festival itself has made public its "strong condemnation" of it, through X.
The film is a free adaptation of the play A Doll's House, by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, transferred to Iranian society, and harshly criticizes the situation of women in the Persian country.
His latest film, Laminor, was released in 2019.
