Legendary Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr, known for his long takes, monochromatic films and depictions of desolate landscapes on the silver screen, died on Tuesday, January 6th, 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,” the statement says.
Béla Tarr made the first Hungarian independent feature film, Damnation, which was screened at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1988.
The film was co-written with László Krasznahorkai, whom he frequently collaborated with and who, in 2025, won the Nobel prize for literature.
Tarr was best known for the movie Satantango (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 still created two short films in 2017 and 2019.
