Béla Tarr
Béla Tarr (1955–2026) was a Hungarian filmmaker widely regarded as one of the founding figures of slow cinema. Born in Pécs, he began making amateur documentaries at sixteen and shot his debut Family Nest (1977) at twenty-two with non-professional actors in a stark, realist register. His mature work — long-take, black-and-white, often glacially paced and built around marginalized characters in bleak landscapes — found its definitive form in his collaborations with the novelist László Krasznahorkai, including the seven-and-a-half-hour Sátántangó (1994), Werckmeister Harmonies (2000), and The Man from London. The Turin Horse (2011) won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at Berlin and was announced as his final feature; he subsequently founded the international film school film.factory in Sarajevo. Sátántangó is regularly cited in scholarly polls of the greatest films of all time.