Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr, best known for his dark and distinctive works of feature filmmaking, has died. He was 70.
Tarr’s death was announced this morning on Hungary’s national news agency MTI by filmmaker Bence Fliegauf on behalf of Tarr’s family. The European Film Academy also shared news of Tarr’s death this afternoon in an email. The Academy said Tarr died “after a long and serious illness.”
Born in Pécs, Hungary, in 1955, Tarr began his career working at Balázs Béla Stúdió, one of Hungary’s seminal studios for experimental film, where he made his feature directorial debut, Family Nest (1977). Tarr won the Grand Prix at the Mannheim Film Festival with Family Nest, after which he enrolled in the Academy of Theatre and Film in Budapest.
He graduated in 1982 and went on to establish Társulás Filmstúdió, where he worked until the studio was closed in 1985. Tarr drew international acclaim in 1988 with his feature Damnation, which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival.
Tarr went on to direct nine features, the final one being Turin Horse (2011), which won the Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival. However, he is perhaps best known for his 1994 feature Sátántangó, a 450-minute adaptation of the novel by László Krasznahorkai. The film won the Grand Prix of the Jury at the Budapest Hungarian Film Week and quickly gained cult status, often referred to as one of the most important films of the 1990s.