Legendary Hungarian director Béla Tarr has died at the age of 70. He was awarded last year in Romania
Béla Tarr, photographed on September 1, 2024 at a film event organized in Barcelona, PHOTO: Inés Baucells / Album / Profimedia Images
The famous film director Bela Tarr passed away on Tuesday, at the age of 70, a colleague of the Hungarian filmmaker, Bence Fliegauf, told MTI, speaking on behalf of his family, AFP and Agerpres report.
Tarr has made 11 feature films over a 40-year career since his 1979 debut with Családi tűzfészek until his last film, Missing Peoplefrom 2019, according to IMDb. Probably his most famous film, Sátántangó (Satan's Tango), presents over the course of seven and a half hours, in black and white, the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe through a fresco of a deserted village in the Hungarian countryside.
The film adapted the 1994 novel of the same name by last year's Nobel Prize for Literature laureate László Krasznahorkai, a frequent collaborator on Tarr's projects.
Tarr also signed on to adapt the writer's 1989 novel – Az ellenallas melankoliaja (The melancholy of resistance) -, set in an isolated place from the communist period, in the film Werckmeister Harmoniesmade in 2000
Tarr received a lifetime achievement award at TIFF last year
The Cultura la duba website recalls that Tarr was invited last year to Cluj-Napoca, to the Transilvania International Film Festival (TIFF), where he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award. Almost all his films, including the masterpieces Damnation or The Turin Horse, filled the theaters at TIFF, in the presence of the director, according to the cited source.
