Legendary Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr passed away on Tuesday after a long illness, the European Film Academy said in a statement. He was 70.

“Bela Tarr passed away on 6 January 2026 after a long and serious illness. We will miss him,” reads a press communique on the official website of the organisation.

Born in Pecs, Hungary, in 1955, Tarr began his career at 16 as an amateur filmmaker. Later, he worked at Balazs Bela Studio, the most important workshop of Hungarian experimental film, where he made his feature directorial debut with Family Nest in 1977.

At the time of winning the Grand Prix at the Mannheim Film Festival for Family Nest, he enrolled in the Academy of Theatre and Film in Budapest, graduating in 1982. That year, he became one of the founders of Tarsulas Filmstudio where he worked until the studio was closed for political reasons in 1985.

In 1985, Tarr started working as an independent filmmaker. He made the first Hungarian independent film Damnation (1987), which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 1988.

Tarr was a pioneer of the slow cinema movement, which was characterised by black-and-white visuals, long and uninterrupted takes, minimal dialogue, a rejection of the traditional narrative plot and mundane depictions of everyday life in Eastern Europe. This is perhaps best embodied in his seven-and-a-half-hour-long 1994 feature film Satantango, which explores the struggle of a small Hungarian village after the fall of communism.

In 2011, Tarr released his ninth and final feature film The Turin Horse, starring Janos Derzsi, Erika Bok and Miholy Kormos.

During the past years, Tarr had been a visiting professor at several film academies and had run workshops and masterclasses for young filmmakers all over the world.

Tarr acted as the honorary president of the Hungarian Filmmakers’s Association and was a member of the Szechenyi Academy of Letters and Arts. Tarr was awarded the most prestigious Hungarian prize for artists, the Kossuth Prize, in 2023. He was also the recipient of the Hungarian prize for filmmakers, Balazs Bela Prize.