The 83-year-old was indelibly associated with the Iranian new wave of cinema, having made The Cow in 1969, one of the movement’s first films.

“During the preliminary investigation, we found that Dariush Mehrjui and his wife, Vahideh Mohammadifar, were killed by multiple stab wounds to the neck,” said Hossein Fazeli-Harikandi, chief justice of Alborz province, near Tehran, according to Mizan online news agency.

In an interview published on Sunday by the newspaper Etemad, the filmmaker’s wife said that she had been threatened and their home had been burgled.

“The investigation revealed that no complaints had been filed regarding the illegal entry into the Mehrjui’s family villa and the theft of their belongings”, said Fazeli-Harikandi.

Dariush Mehrjui’s most notable films, alongside The Cow, included Mr Gullible (1970), The Cycle (1977), The Tenants (1987), Hamoun (1990), Sara (1993), Pari (1995), and Leila (1997).

The films were all screened at the Forum des Images in Paris, during a tribute attended by Mehrjui.

Between 1980 and 1985, the filmmaker lived in France where he worked on the documentary Journey to the Land of Rimbaud (1983).

On returning to Iran, he triumphed at the box office with The Tenants.

In 1990, he directed Hamoun, a dark comedy showing 24 hours in the life of an intellectual tormented by his divorce and his intellectual anxieties in an Iran overwhelmed by the technology companies Sony and Toshiba.

Throughout the 1990s, Mehrjui also depicted the lives of women in Sara, Pari and Leila, a melodrama about an infertile woman who encourages her husband to marry a second woman.