Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr has passed away aged 70

Hungarian film director Béla Tarr has passed away aged 70. According to his family, Tarr passed early yesterday morning, January 5, due to a long and serious illness.

Béla Tarr was born in 1955 in the southern Hungarian city of Pécs. From a young age, he showed an interest in the film industry, starting filmmaking just aged 16 with a camera his father had gifted him.

In later years, Tarr joined Hungary's leading experimental film studio, Balázs Béla Studio. This allowed him, in 1977, to make his first feature film, Family Nest, which depicted Hungary's housing shortage.

In 1988, his first Hungarian independent feature film, Damnation, which was co-written with László Krasznahorkai, was screened in the Berlin International Film Festival.

However, Tarr's best-known work is the monumental seven-hour-long film, from 1994, Sátántango,  which showcased the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. The epic was adapted from Krasznahorkai's novel, which, last year, granted him the Nobel Prize for Literature.

In 2011, the same year The Turntin Horse was released, the filmmaker announced his retirement. Yet in 2017 and 2019, he made two short films.

In recent years, he had dedicated himself to educating the next generation of directors. He taught in multiple film academies in Hungary, Germany, and France, but in 2013, after having moved to Sarajevo, the director created a film school called Film.Factory.

The director dedicated himself to his craft, influencing many, such as Gus Van Sant and László Nemes.

The Chicago International Film Festival took to X, saying, "RIP to Béla Tarr, the visionary Hungarian director who inspired a generation of independent filmmakers.

On the same platform, the Scottish author and cultural critic, Ewan Morrison, also wrote a tribute to the director:

Sorry to hear that one of our most beloved directors has died today at age 70, after a long illness.
Hungarian director Béla Tarr was the pioneer of austere cinema. His films are often seen as dark & misanthropic, but they have a deep, melancholic, compassion to them.
RIP Béla. pic.twitter.com/raBzzxOiOh

— Ewan Morrison (@MrEwanMorrison) January 6, 2026