Dariush Mehrjui (Director)

Born: Tehran, 1939.

Proclaims the influence of Italian Neorealism, Eisenstein and D.W. Griffith.
His second feature as director, The Cow, won international and critical acclaim, and was a collaboration with the renowned writer Gholamhossein Saedi, who had also written the initial story the film was based on.

"After his early upbringing and education he left for the United States, where he attended college at the University of California, Los Angeles, studying film, although he graduated with a degree in philosophy. Mehrjui returned to Iran in 1965 and began his long and extraordinarily productive career with a bizarre spoof called Diamond 33 (1965), a frivolous adaptation of the James Bond films—a rather inauspicious beginning for an otherwise seminal figure in Iranian cinema. While in Los Angeles, Mehrjui had become interested in Gholamhossein Saedi's dramatic works, and soon after the fiasco of Diamond 33 he approached Saedi and the two of them began collaborating on the screen adaptation of one of his short stories—"The Cow"—which became by far the most significant achievement of Iranian cinema after the pioneering works of Farrokhzad and Golestan, before the sudden rise of a new generation of visionary filmmakers in the 1980s." [Dabashi, M&M]

His films are mostly adaptations of literary or theatrical works, of Persian or European literature, including 'Woyzeck' and a Henrik Ibsen play.