Béla Tarr to Receive Honorary Award From European Film Academy

Hungarian director Béla Tarr will receive the Honorary Award of the European Film Academy president and board at the 36th European Film Awards in Berlin on Dec. 9.

“With this award the European Film Academy (EFA) wishes to pay special tribute to an outstanding director and a personality with a strong political voice, who is not only deeply respected by his colleagues but also celebrated by audiences worldwide,” EFA said on Wednesday. “Béla Tarr is the sixth filmmaker to receive this recognition – earlier recipients were Manoel de Oliveira, Michel Piccoli, Sir Michael Caine, Andrzej Wajda and Costa-Gavras.”

Born in Hungary, the auteur started experiments in filmmaking at the age of 16. His feature debut, Family Nest. In 1982, The Prefab People received a special mention at the Locarno Film Festival. Tarr followed that up with Almanac of Fall (1984) and Damnation, which was nominated for the first European Film Awards in 1988.

One of Tarr’s best-known films is Sátántangó, a 450-minute adaptation of the novel of the same name by László Krasznahorkai, which was featured in the Berlin Film Festival’s Forum section in 1994 where it won the Caligari award. “It also exemplifies quite well Béla Tarr’s unique style, his films following their own rhythm, taking time in long black-and-white shots,” EFA highlighted.

The organization also mentioned his movies Werckmeister Harmoniak and The Man From London, an adaptation of L’Homme de Londres by Georges Simenon with Tilda Swinton, which played in competition in Cannes in 2007, which had two years earlier celebrated Tarr as “Foreign Cineaste of the Year.”

His 2011 film The Turin Horse received the jury’s Grand Prix Silver Bear and FIPRESCI awards at the Berlin Film Festival and was nominated for the European Film Awards.

In 2013, he founded a film school, known as “film.factory” in Sarajevo and moved there in 2016.