Bela America

Béla Tarr (21 July 1955 – 6 January 2026) was a Hungarian film director, screenwriter and producer. His films are distinguished by their stark black-and-white visuals, extended long takes, languid pacing, and an absence of traditional plotting. They explore existential themes and often focus on marginalized, desperate characters in bleak landscapes. He became known as a founding figure of the slow cinema genre, most notably with his influential 1994 film Sátántangó. That film is often in scholarly polls of the greatest films ever made. Debuting with the film Family Nest (1979), Tarr began his directorial career with a brief period of what he refers to as "social cinema", aimed at telling everyday stories about ordinary people, often in the style of cinema vérité. Almanac of Fall (1984) follows the inhabitants of a run-down apartment as they struggle to live together while sharing their hostilities. The drama Damnation (1988) was lauded for its languid and controlled camera movement, which Tarr would become known for internationally. Sátántangó (1994) and Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) continued his bleak and desolate representations of reality, while incorporating apocalyptic overtones. Tarr would later compete at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival with his film The Man from London, which opened to moderately positive reviews. After the release of the critically acclaimed A torinói ló (The Turin Horse) (2011), Tarr announced his retirement from feature-length film direction and turned increasingly toward film education. In Sarajevo, he founded the international film school known as film.factory, which officially began its work in February 2013 within the Sarajevo School of Science and Technology. Tarr served as the programme's designer, head and professor until 2016; the film.factory project at the Sarajevo Film Academy was completed in September 2017. In his last decades, he continued to explore media beyond traditional film form. In 2017, at Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam, he developed an exhibition entitled Till the End of the World - a cross between a film, a theatre set, and an installation, which attracted over 40,000 visitors. Commissioned by the Wiener Festwochen, in 2019, he authored Missing People, a site-specific project created at the intersection between performance, installation, and motion picture, involving 250 Viennese homeless people. Tarr's films were shaped by a recurring creative team. Editor and co-director Ágnes Hranitzky first worked with Tarr as editor of The Outsider (1981) and remained his longest-standing creative and directorial collaborator. Beginning with Werckmeister Harmonies, she was also credited as co-director on Tarr's later feature films, including The Man from London and The Turin Horse. From Kárhozat (Damnation) onwards, his key collaborators included Nobel Prize-winning László Krasznahorkai, composer Mihály Víg, cinematographer Gábor Medvigy, and artist, set and costume designer Gyula Pauer. Víg’s contribution ext