His death, confirmed by his wife, actress Marzieh Vafamehr, followed years of poor health. “He loved plants—let us plant a tree in his memory. He loved light—let us add our candle to his,” she wrote on Facebook.

Born in 1941 in the southern oil city of Abadan, Taghvai was part of the generation that shaped modern Iranian cinema before and after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Trained in literature, he began as a short-story writer before turning to film, saying later that he had discovered “how the camera could think.”

Taghvai’s early films, Tranquility in the Presence of Others (1969) and Sadegh the Kurd (1972), broke with the conventional realism of their time. His 1976 television series My Uncle Napoleon, based on Iraj Pezeshkzad’s satirical novel, became one of Iran’s most beloved cultural works and remains a touchstone across generations.

His Captain Khorshid (1987), an adaptation of Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not set in the Persian Gulf, won the Bronze Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival and is widely regarded as a classic of post-revolutionary Iranian cinema. Later films such as O Iran (1990) and Unruled Paper (2002) explored themes of loyalty, resistance, and social alienation.

Filmmaker Rasul Sadr Ameli described Taghvai as “a director who understood people deeply,” adding that his films reflected “a human and anthropological insight rare in cinema.”

In his later years, Taghvai largely withdrew from public life, turning to photography and essays on the landscapes of southern Iran. Despite his long silence, he remained a model of artistic integrity for younger generations.

Tributes poured in from Iran’s cultural community. Culture Minister Abbas Salehi called him “a lasting figure in the history of Iranian cinema,” while the Farabi Cinema Foundation praised him as “a visionary who redefined Iranian storytelling.”

Taghvai’s death, coming a year after the killing of fellow filmmaker Dariush Mehrjui, has been widely seen as marking the end of an era for Iran’s modernist cinema.

He is survived by his wife, Marzieh Vafamehr and a son, Ali.