Celebrated Hungarian director Béla Tarr, honoured with IFFK Lifetime Achievement Award, passes away

Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr, known for his unique films that were often long and darkly comic, passed away at 70. In a statement on Tuesday, the Hungarian Filmmakers' Association confirmed Tarr's death after a long and serious illness. Béla is the recipient of numerous awards and had also won the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 27th International Film Festival of Kerala in 2022.

During a career spanning decades, Béla wrote and directed nine feature films, starting with his debut, Family Nest, in 1979 and ending in 2011 with The Turin Horse, which won the Silver Bear Jury Grand Prize at the Berlin International Film Festival that year. Tarr frequently collaborated with Hungarian author Laszlo Krasznahorkai, who last year won the Nobel Prize in literature. Béla's films, some of which were adaptations of Krasznahorkai's novels (’Satantango’ and ‘Werckmeister Harmonies’), have been awarded prizes at festivals around Europe and Asia, and he received honorary professorships at universities in China.

According to PTI, Tarr was born in 1955 in the southern Hungarian city of Pecs, but lived most of his life in the capital, Budapest. He completed his first feature film, Family Nest, when he was only 23. That film won the Grand Prize at the Mannheim-Heidelberg International Film Festival that year. His films, the longest of which, Satantango, clocks in at 439 minutes or more than seven hours long, were widely praised as being beautifully shot while often using slow pacing and stark imagery to depict despair and social decay.

Often shot in black and white and defined by long, hypnotic single takes that could last upward of ten minutes, Tarr's films depict bleak, hopeless, even dystopian landscapes set during Hungary's socialist era or in the years following the end of Soviet-dominated communism in Eastern Europe. One of his most celebrated films, Damnation released in 1988, was co-written with Krasznahorkai and, after being positively received on the film festival circuit, helped to propel Tarr toward greater international recognition.

His unique style made his work a major influence on art house cinema including American filmmakers Gus van Sant and Jim Jarmusch, who have praised his vision. Tarr worked closely with his editor and principal collaborator gnes Hranitzky for decades, and Hranitszky edited all of Tarr's films beginning with The Outsider in 1981. She also received co-directing credit alongside Béla  in his final three feature films, Werckmeister Harmonies, The Man from London and The Turin Horse.

Béla was at times politically outspoken, and criticised nationalism and populist politicians such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, as well as US President Donald Trump and France's far-right leader Marine Le Pen. He was also critical of Hungary's cultural policies under Orban, and helped sponsor a group of students at the University of Theatre and Film Arts in Budapest who had occupied their campus in protest of government measures in 2020.

Following the release of his final feature film ‘The Turin Horse’ in 2011, Tarr moved to the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo where he founded a film academy known as film.factory. From there, he produced numerous films by the academy's students, and split his time between Sarajevo and Budapest.

(With inputs from PTI)