Béla Tarr began his career at sixteen as an amateur filmmaker. Later he worked at Balázs Béla Stúdió, the most important workshop of Hungarian experimental film, where he made his feature directorial debut. Tarr was a student of the Academy of Theatre and Film (Színház- és Filmművészeti Egyetem) in Budapest between 1977 and 1981. In 1981 he was one of the founders of Társulás Filmstúdió, since its closure in 1985 he has worked as an independent filmmaker. In 1989 and 1990 he lived in Berlin as a guest of the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogram, between 1990 and 2011 he was an associate professor at the DFFB in Berlin, Germany. He became a member of the European Film Academy in 1997.
In 2003 he founded TT Filmműhely, an independent film workshop that was led by him until 2011. TT Filmműhely produced his latest films and Tarr acted as producer on other remarkable filmmakers’ movies, including Miklos Jancso. The international film school film.factory in Sarajevo was founded by Tarr in 2012; he was the head of the programme and professor till 2016. Tarr remains a visiting professor at several film academies. He is the president of the Hungarian Filmmakers’ Association, a member of the Széchenyi Academy of Letters and Arts, has been given the most prestigious Hungarian prize for artists, the Kossuth Prize and the Hungarian prize for filmmakers, Balázs Béla Prize. He was named a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres and was honored with numerous remarkable national, international awards, honorary doctorates and life achievement awards.
His filmography includes Family Nest / Családi tüzfészek (1977), Hotel Magnezit (short film) (1978), The Outsider / Szabadgyalog (1981), Macbeth (feature/TV movie, video) (1982), The Prefab People / Panelkapcsolat (1982), Almanach of Fall / Öszi almanach (1985), Damnation / Kárhozat (1988), City Life – Segment The Last Boat / Utolsó hajó (1989), Sátántangó (1994), Journey on the Plain (short film, video) (1995), Werckmeister Harmonies / Werckmeister harmóniák (2000), Visions of Europe – Prologue segment (short film) (2004), The Man from London / A londoni férfi (2007), and The Turin Horse / A torinói ló (2011). After his self-proclaimed retirement from filmmaking, he embarked on a new creative path with his highly acclaimed exhibition Till the End of the World seen by 40000 visitors at the Eye Film Museum Amsterdam in 2017. His monumental production Missing People, presented exclusively during the Wiener Festwochen 2019 at the filming location itself, has shown Tarr experimenting with a new format in the intersection of film, installation and performance, which he described as a „visual poem“.
