Béla Tarr, the internationally renowned Hungarian filmmaker, passed away on Tuesday at the age of 70. His death followed a long and serious illness.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the news was confirmed by Hungarian filmmaker Bence Fliegauf on behalf of the Tarr family to Hungary’s national news agency MTI. Tributes quickly followed from across the international film community.
“Béla Tarr was a storyteller. May his journey be easy. Thank you for being with us,” wrote Bojár Iván András in a Facebook post announcing the filmmaker’s passing. The European Film Academy also confirmed his death, noting the prolonged illness that preceded it.
According to the Hungarian Literarure Online, born on July 21, 1955, Tarr began his filmmaking career at a young age. He directed his first feature, Family Nest (1979), before being accepted into the University of Theatre and Film Arts in Budapest. His early works, including The Prefab People, demonstrated a restless experimentation with form, sound, and social realism.
Tarr directed nine feature films, concluding with The Turin Horse in 2011, after which he retired from filmmaking.
Tarr’s films typically eschew traditional plot in favor of existential inquiry, focusing on marginalized figures living in bleak, often dystopian, post-communist Hungarian landscapes. His work explored themes of human endurance, moral collapse, and the quiet desperation of everyday life. This distinctive vision exerted a lasting influence on generations of filmmakers worldwide, including Jim Jarmusch and Gus Van Sant.
A decisive turning point in Tarr’s career came with his collaboration with writer László Krasznahorkai, who would later receive the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2025. Beginning with Damnation (1987), a landmark of Hungarian “black cinema,” their partnership produced Tarr’s most celebrated films: the seven-and-a-half-hour epic Sátántangó; Werckmeister Harmonies; The Man from London; and The Turin Horse. These works were co-authored and shaped in close collaboration with editor Ágnes Hranitzky.