Prominent Hungarian director Béla Tarr, known for the films "Sátántangó", "The Turin Horse" and winner of many awards for his long and often darkly humorous works, has passed away at the age of 70.
Over a career spanning several decades, Tarr wrote and directed nine feature films, starting with his debut "Family Nest" in 1979 and ending in 2011 with "The Turin Horse," which won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at that year's Berlin International Film Festival.
Tarr often collaborated with Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature last year. Several of his films, which were adaptations of Krasznahorkai's novels, won awards at festivals in Europe and Asia.
In a statement, the Hungarian Directors Association confirmed Tarr's death, writing:
"It is with deep sorrow that we announce that, after a long and serious illness, director Béla Tarr passed away early this morning."
Tarr was born in 1955 in the southern Hungarian city of Pécs, but spent most of his life in the capital, Budapest.
He completed his first feature film, "Family Nest," when he was only 23. This film won the Grand Prize at the Mannheim-Heidelberg International Film Festival that year.
Béla Tarr was known for a radical and easily recognizable cinematic language, built on very long shots, slow pace and strong black and white images. His works did not aim at classical narrative, but at the experience of time, space and state of mind, focusing on the loneliness, despair and absurdity of human existence, often in poor and destroyed post-communist realities. Through this harsh minimalism, Tarr became one of the fundamental figures of slow cinema and a major influence on art cinema authors around the world.
