Béla Tarr

Béla Tarr was born on 21 July 1955 in Pécs, Hungary, and grew up in Budapest. His parents both worked in theatre and film. His father, also named Béla Tarr, was a set designer whose work included the Hungarian State Opera, and his mother, Mari Tarr (born Mária Huszth, 1934 to 2023), was a respected prompter at the Madách Theatre for more than fifty years. His brother, György Tarr, became a painter.

At the age of ten his mother took him to a casting session at Hungarian Television, and he won the role of the protagonist's son in a television adaptation of Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Apart from a small part in Miklós Jancsó's Season of Monsters and a few brief cameos, he never sought acting work again.

His father bought him an 8mm camera for his fourteenth birthday. At sixteen he founded an amateur filmmaking group with friends, named after the Dziga Vertov Group. Their film Guest Workers won first prize at an amateur festival, and Tarr was questioned by the communist authorities as a result. Another documentary about a family living in a squat ended with the police evicting the family and arresting him. He hoped to study philosophy but was rejected from higher education, so he worked as a labourer, a caretaker at a cultural centre and a receptionist while he continued to make amateur films.

Barred at first from university, Tarr learned filmmaking through amateur work and through the Béla Balázs Studio in Budapest, which supported young and outsider filmmakers. After the success of his debut feature Family Nest, he was admitted to the Academy of Theatre and Film Arts in Budapest (now the University of Theatre and Film Arts), where he studied directing from 1977 and graduated in 1981. His television Macbeth, starring György Cserhalmi, was his diploma work.

Tarr's first feature, Family Nest (Családi tűzfészek), was funded by the Béla Balázs Studio and shot in six days with non-professional actors and improvised dialogue when he was 22. Released in 1979, it was a blunt social realist portrait of a family squeezed by the housing shortage and won the Grand Prize at the Mannheim-Heidelberg International Film Festival. The Outsider (1981) and The Prefab People (1982), his first film with professional leads, continued in that documentary-like vein. In 1981 he co-founded the Társulás Studio with other young filmmakers.

His 1982 television Macbeth consisted of only two shots, one of five minutes and one of 57 minutes, and marked a move towards formal experiment. Almanac of Fall (1984), shot in colour, was deliberately more stylised.

With Damnation (Kárhozat, 1988) Tarr began his long collaboration with the novelist László Krasznahorkai, later a Nobel laureate, and the composer Mihály Víg. The film's black-and-white images, decaying landscapes, rain and slow, gliding camera established the style he became famous for. Sátántangó (1994), adapted from Krasznahorkai's novel, runs more than seven hours and opens with a long take of cows wandering through a muddy village. It won awards including the Caligari Film Award at the Berlin International Film Festival. Werckmeister Harmonies (2000), also from Krasznahorkai, was acclaimed on the festival circuit.

The Man from London, adapted from Georges Simenon and starring Tilda Swinton, was delayed by the suicide of producer Humbert Balsan in 2005 and premiered in competition at Cannes in 2007. The Turin Horse (2011), inspired by an anecdote about Friedrich Nietzsche, won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize and the FIPRESCI Prize at the 61st Berlin International Film Festival. Tarr announced it would be his last feature film.

His films relied on a loyal team: editor and co-director Ágnes Hranitzky, writer László Krasznahorkai, composer Mihály Víg, cinematographers Gábor Medvigy and Fred Kelemen, designer Gyula Pauer, and actors such as János Derzsi, Erika Bók and Mihály Kormos.

After retiring from features he founded film.factory, an international film school in Sarajevo that began work in February 2013 within the Sarajevo School of Science and Technology, and he led it until 2016. He created the exhibition Till the End of the World at the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam in 2017, which drew more than 40,000 visitors, and Missing People for the Wiener Festwochen in 2019, involving around 250 homeless people in Vienna. He executive-produced Lamb (2021), directed by his former student Valdimar Jóhannsson.

For decades Tarr's partner in life and work was the editor and director Ágnes Hranitzky, who edited his films from The Outsider (1981) onwards and was credited as co-director on Werckmeister Harmonies, The Man from London and The Turin Horse. They never married, and their romantic partnership ended in 2012, though they remained close. In 2025 he married the art curator Amila Ramović. He had a stepdaughter, Réka Gáborjáni-Szabó. Tarr was an atheist.

Tarr became an anarchist in his last years at secondary school and said in a 2023 interview that he still considered himself one. He was a strong critic of nationalism and populism. In a 2016 interview he called Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán and Marine Le Pen the shame of their countries, and he accused the Hungarian government of waging a political war against intellectuals. In a letter displayed at a pro-migration exhibition outside the Hungarian Parliament he asked what morality people represented when they built a fence to keep refugees out.

In 2011 he joined the board of the human rights cinema foundation Cine Foundation International and campaigned for the release of the imprisoned Iranian filmmakers Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof. In December 2023 he was among about 50 filmmakers who signed an open letter in Libération calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, a humanitarian corridor and the release of hostages.

Tarr is regarded as a founding figure of slow cinema. Sátántangó was placed 78th in the 2022 Sight and Sound poll of the greatest films of all time, and his work is the subject of books by Jacques Rancière and András Bálint Kovács. Gus Van Sant has cited him as a major influence, beginning with Gerry (2002), which thanks Tarr in its credits. Through film.factory in Sarajevo he trained a generation of international filmmakers, and he championed younger directors as a producer. On 23 February 2026 the minor planet 305264 was named Tarrbéla in his honour. After his death the anarchist publication Freedom published a eulogy noting that his social realism was always suspicious of established power.

Grand Prize, Mannheim-Heidelberg International Film Festival, for Family Nest (1979). Special Mention at Locarno for The Prefab People (1982) and the Ernest Artaria Award at Locarno for Almanac of Fall (1984). Béla Balázs Prize (1982). Bronze Rosa Camuna, Bergamo Film Meeting, for Damnation (1988). For Sátántangó (1994): Caligari Film Award at Berlin, the National Society of Film Critics Award for Experimental Film, the Prix de l'Âge d'Or in Brussels and the Grand Prix of the Hungarian Film Week. Berliner Zeitung Jury Award for Werckmeister Harmonies (2001). Kossuth Prize (2003). France Culture Award for Foreign Filmmaker of the Year (2005). Middle Cross of the Hungarian Order of Merit (2005). Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize and FIPRESCI Prize at the 61st Berlin International Film Festival for The Turin Horse (2011). Honorary professor at the Beijing Film Academy (2016) and Wuhan University (2017). Lifetime achievement awards at the International Film Festival of Kerala (2022) and the Tokyo International Film Festival (2024). Honorary Award of the EFA President and Board at the 36th European Film Awards (2023). Honorary doctorate from FAMU, Prague (2023).

Feature films: Family Nest (Családi tűzfészek, 1979); The Outsider (Szabadgyalog, 1981); The Prefab People (Panelkapcsolat, 1982); Almanac of Fall (Őszi almanach, 1984); Damnation (Kárhozat, 1988); Sátántangó (1994); Werckmeister Harmonies (Werckmeister harmóniák, 2000); The Man from London (A londoni férfi, 2007); The Turin Horse (A torinói ló, 2011).

Television: Macbeth (1982).

Short and documentary works: Hotel Magnezit (1978); Cinemarxisme (1979); The Last Boat (1990, segment of City Life); Journey on the Plain (1995); Prologue (2004, segment of Visions of Europe); Muhamed (2017); Missing People (2019).

As producer: Lamb (2021, executive producer).

Béla Tarr died in the early hours of 6 January 2026 in a hospital in Budapest, aged 70, after a long and serious illness. His death was announced by the European Film Academy, of which he was a member. The specific cause was not made public. Tributes came from film institutions around the world, including Sight and Sound, Letterboxd, Janus Films, MUBI, Film at Lincoln Center and TIFF. He was laid to rest in the Fiumei Road Cemetery (Kerepesi Cemetery) in Budapest on 6 February 2026.