‘I am a protester! […] I am a victim of [your injustice]. … Who are you [to act] like ghosts behind curtains and issue orders [arbitrarily]? … I can’t take this [injustice] anymore! I declare war against you and your organisation! Look! Here is my chest – Come and kill me! Destroy me! Do what you want to me! But know that I will seek my rights with my life!’
In an emotional and eerily prescient video message, some eighteen months before he and his wife, Vahideh Mohammadi, were savagely stabbed to death on Sunday, October 15th, 2023 in their home in a Tehran suburb, Dariush Mehrjui, pulled at his chest and railed against the Islamic regime and its stifling culture policies.
Mehrjui is not only considered one of the greatest filmmakers in the art world, but also a contentious figure both amongst the proponents and opponents of the Islamic Republic. I show how he navigated his art through the highly charged political maze in both pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary Iran, and how he could maintain his artistic and Intellectual honesty
Mehrjui did what he could to fight the unbearable injustices forced on Iranians by the theocratic Islamic regime. Iran’s lovers come in all shapes, colours and political backgrounds. As long as they are on the side of a free, prosperous and democratic Iran, they are on the right side of history. We can only overthrow the regime and free the country and the region from their evil force, if we all unite. Unity is the secret to our success.
In the last days of his life, Mehrjui was collaborating with Hassan Solhjou, a filmmaker and a senior producer of BBC World Service, on a (unfinished) documentary in which he passionately expressed his opposition to the regime and the compulsory hijab by beseeching his wife to remove her hijab. After some deliberation she does and they both laughingly hang the pink scarf from a tree. Sadly, it took his and his wife’s bloodied corpses to show that Mehrjui stood on the right side of history.