Béla Tar

Director/Screenwriter

Among the most influential and lauded art house filmmakers, Béla Tarr was born in 1955 in Pécs, Hungary. He began his career at sixteen as an amateur filmmaker. He later worked at Balázs Béla Stúdió, the most important workshop for Hungarian experimental film, where he made his feature directorial debut, Family Nest (1977). Tarr was a student of the Academy of Theatre and Film (Színház- és Filmművészeti Egyetem) in Budapest between 1977 and 1981. In 1981 he co-founded Társulás Filmstúdió, and since its closure in 1985 he’s worked as an independent filmmaker, directing multiple internationally acknowledged masterpieces - among them Sátántangó (1994), Werckmeister Harmonies, and The Turn Horse (2011) – in collaboration with editor and co-director Ágnes Hranitzky.

In 1989 and 1990 he lived in Berlin as a guest of the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogram and between 1990 and 2011 he was an associate professor at the DFFB in Berlin, Germany. He became the member of the European Film Academy in 1997. In 2003 he founded TT Filmműhely, an independent film workshop and production company which he led until 2011. TT Filmműhely produced Tarr’s last two films, as well as features by other emerging filmmakers. In 2011 Tarr announced his official retirement from feature filmmaking and the following year founded the well-known international film school Film.factory in Sarajevo, where he served as both Head of Programmes and professor until 2016. Tarr continues to teach and routinely works as a visiting professor at several film academies. In 2017, Tarr created an interdisciplinary film/theatre/installation exhibition entitled Till the End of the World for the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam. In 2019, he premiered another hybrid film & performance piece titled The MissingPeople, for the Wiener Festwochen in Vienna.

Tarr is the president of the Hungarian Filmmakers’ Association, a member of the Széchenyi Academy of Letters and Arts. He’s been awarded the Kossuth Prize, Hungary’s highest honor for artists, and the Balázs Béla Prize for Hungarian filmmakers. He was named a “Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres” and has been honored with several remarkable national, international awards, honorary doctorates and life achievement awards. In 2018 he was invited to become a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.