Yvette Bíró

Yvette Bíró was born Yvette Edda Ungár in Budapest on 3 April 1930. She attended the Jewish Gymnasium of the Pest Israelite Community in Budapest. She went on to study literature and film, and in 1968 she was awarded the degree of candidate of literary studies, the Hungarian equivalent of a doctorate. She took the surname Bíró from her first marriage, and was known professionally as Bíró Yvette in Hungary and as Yvette Biro in the English-speaking world.

Bíró began as a film scholar in Budapest. Her early books, A film formanyelve (The Formal Language of Film, 1964) and A film drámaisága (The Dramatic Quality of Film, 1967), became handbooks for Hungarian film schools. From 1965 to 1973 she was editor-in-chief of Filmkultúra, the journal of the Hungarian Film Institute and Film Archive. From 1968 she worked as a dramaturg on several films by Miklós Jancsó, and she also worked on films by Márta Mészáros, Zoltán Fábri, Károly Makk and Imre Fehér. From 1970 to 1977 she was vice-president of FIPRESCI, the International Federation of Film Critics.

In 1976 she left Hungary, moving first to Paris and later to the United States. She taught in Paris, Jerusalem, Berkeley and Stanford before joining the Film and Television Graduate Division of the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University in 1982. She became a full professor there, taught screenwriting until she retired in 2007, and was then professor emeritus. A book on Miklós Jancsó, with a foreword by Andrzej Wajda, appeared in Paris in 1977, and her English-language books included Profane Mythology: The Savage Mind of the Cinema (Indiana University Press, 1982) and Turbulence and Flow in Film (Indiana University Press, 2008). Her essays appeared in Film Quarterly, Performing Arts Journal, Daedalus and The Village Voice, among other publications.

As a screenwriter, a German-French film she wrote won the audience award at the Berlin Film Festival in 1984, according to MTI. Her script Arrivals and Departures won a European Script Fund award. She co-wrote The Stone Raft, based on the novel by José Saramago, and became a regular creative partner of the director Kornél Mundruczó, co-writing Johanna, Delta, which won the FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes in 2008, and Tender Son: The Frankenstein Project, as well as the stage works The Frankenstein Project and Judasevangelium. Her autobiographically inspired novel Futó was published by Magvető in 2011.

Her first husband was János Bíró (1926 to 1969), a physician who held the degree of candidate of medical sciences. Their son András was born in 1954 and was a pupil at the Radnóti Gymnasium in Budapest. Father and son were both killed in a car accident at Sinești in Romania on 17 July 1969. Bíró later married the architect and architectural writer Attila Batár (1925 to 2022), a winner of the Farkas Molnár Prize. After emigrating she lived in Paris and New York, and she wrote and published in Hungarian, French and English.

Yvette Bíró died in Paris on the night of Saturday 17 October 2026, after a long illness borne with patience, at the age of 96. Her family informed the Hungarian news agency MTI on Sunday 18 October, and the news was carried that day by 24.hu, 444, Blikk, Origo, Index and HVG. No specific cause of death was made public. Funeral arrangements had not been announced in the first reports.

Bíró was one of the central figures of Hungarian film culture in the 1960s and early 1970s, both as the editor of Filmkultúra and as a theorist whose books shaped how a generation of Hungarian filmmakers learned their craft. Her work as a dramaturg linked her to the golden age of Hungarian cinema around Miklós Jancsó. After emigrating she taught screenwriting to decades of graduate students at New York University, and her late partnership with Kornél Mundruczó carried her influence into a new generation of European cinema. She was honoured with the Béla Balázs Prize in 1995 and the Prize for Parallel Culture in 2003, and was an honorary member of the Széchenyi Academy of Literature and Arts.