The legendary Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr, known for his long takes, monochromatic films, and depictions of desolate landscapes on the big screen, has died at the age of 70.
Hungary's national news agency MTI reported his death, citing a statement director Bence Fliegauf made on behalf of the family.
"It is with deep sorrow that we announce that film director Béla Tarr passed away early this morning after a long and serious illness," local news site Telex quoted the statement as saying.
Béla Tarr was born in the southern Hungarian university town of Pécs in 1955.
He started filmmaking as an amateur at the age of 16 with a camera his father gifted to him.
Tarr then joined Hungary's leading experimental film studio Balázs Béla Studio, which enabled him to make his first feature film, Family Nest, in 1977.
He made the first Hungarian independent feature film, Damnation, which was screened at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1988.
The film was co-written by László Krasznahorkai, a frequent collaborator who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2025.
Tarr was best known for the film Sátántangó (1994), a seven-hour epic about the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and its material and spiritual decline.
It was adapted from one of Krasznahorkai's best-known novels.
After completing his last feature film, The Turin Horse in 2011, Tarr announced his retirement, although he made two short films in 2017 and 2019.
In recent years, Tarr devoted himself to educating a new generation of directors, teaching at multiple film academies in Hungary, Germany, and France.
"I had done everything I wanted to," he told Hungarian weekly HVG in a 2019 interview.
Source: AFP
