Iranian director Dariush Mehrjui and his wife found murdered in their home

Dariush Mehrjui, the director who helped lead a new filmmaking movement in his native Iran with films like 1969’s The Cow, was found stabbed to death this weekend alongside his wife, Vahideh Mohammadifar, in their home near Tehran. That comes from Variety, which says the news was first reported by Iran’s state media organization IRNA, which had said that the couple was found by their daughter with stab wounds in their necks. The killer has not been identified, but IRNA said that someone had recently made “alleged knife threats” to Mehrjui and his wife on social media. Mehrjui was 83.

Mehrjui, who briefly studied film at UCLA in the ‘60s but switched to philosophy due to his frustrations with the program’s teachers, co-founded the Iranian New Wave movement, which centered around films that dealt with regular life in Iran in a way that wasn’t being reflected elsewhere in the nation’s culture. After the Iranian Revolution in the ‘70s, Iranian New Wave films began to take on more arthouse sensibilities, embracing symbolism and philosophical messages, which Mehrjui used to tell stories about lives in Iran that might otherwise be overlooked—like unsatisfied middle-class people in The Pear Tree, women pushing up against the country’s conservative culture in Bemani, and the complicated relationship between a man and a woman who is unable to have children in Leila. He also made an unauthorized adaptation of J.D. Salinger’s Franny And Zooey in 1995 called Pari that Salinger himself attempted to block from release.

Over the course of his career, Mehrjui won a Golden Seashell at the San Sebastián Film Festival in 1993, a Silver Hugo at the Chicago International Film Festival in 1998, and a Crystal Simorgh at Tehran’s Fajr Film Festival in 2004.

Other details about the murder of Mehrjui and his wife have not been released publicly.