Legendary Hungarian film director Bela Tarr, best known for the film ‘Satantango’, has died at the age of 70.
According to the AFPThe Hungarian National News Agency reported Tarr’s death citing a statement made by director Bence Fliegauf on behalf of the family.
“It is with deep sadness that we announce that film director Bela Tarr passed away early this morning after a long and serious illness,” the local news site quoted the statement as saying.
Tarr was best known for the film “Satantango” (1994), a seven-hour epic about the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and its material and spiritual decline.
It is adapted from one of the best-known novels by Nobel Prize winner Laszlo Krasznahorkai, with whom he regularly collaborated.
Tarr “created colors by making them disappear, because in his great films he tried to speak as the sinner who nevertheless, with all his sins, still needs to be loved,” Krasznahorkai said in a speech last year after receiving his Nobel Prize.
Bela was born in 1955 in the southern Hungarian university town of Pecs.
He started filming as an amateur at the age of 16 with a camera gifted to him by his father.
Tarr then joined leading experimental film studio Bela Balazs Studio in Hungary, allowing him to make his first feature film, “Family Nest”, in 1977.
He made the first Hungarian independent feature film, “Damnation”, which was shown at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1988.
