Who dated Béla Tarr?

Béla Tarr (21 July 1955 – 6 January 2026) was a Hungarian film director, screenwriter and producer. His films are distinguished by their stark black-and-white visuals, extended long takes, languid pacing, and an absence of traditional plotting. They explore existential themes and often focus on marginalized, desperate characters in bleak landscapes. He became known as a founding figure of the slow cinema genre, most notably with his influential 1994 film Sátántangó. That film is often in scholarly polls of the greatest films ever made.

Debuting with the film Family Nest (1979), Tarr began his directorial career with a brief period of what he refers to as "social cinema", aimed at telling everyday stories about ordinary people, often in the style of cinema vérité. Almanac of Fall (1984) follows the inhabitants of a run-down apartment as they struggle to live together while sharing their hostilities. The drama Damnation (1988) was lauded for its languid and controlled camera movement, which Tarr would become known for internationally. Sátántangó (1994) and Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) continued his bleak and desolate representations of reality, while incorporating apocalyptic overtones. Tarr would later compete at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival with his film The Man from London, which opened to moderately positive reviews.

After the release of the critically acclaimed The Turin Horse (2011), Tarr announced his retirement from feature-length film direction. In February 2012 he moved to Sarajevo and in 2013 started an international film school known as film.factory, and lived between Budapest and Sarajevo thereafter. Lauded as one of the most exciting film schools in the world, it has practiced an unconventional and open study format with renowned international film artists as teachers.

In his last decades, he continued to explore media beyond traditional film form. In 2017, at Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam, he developed an exhibition entitled Till the End of the World - a cross between a film, a theatre set, and an installation, which attracted over 40,000 visitors. Commissioned by the Wiener Festwochen, in 2019, he authored Missing People, a site-specific project created at the intersection between performance, installation, and motion picture, involving 250 Viennese homeless people.

Director and editor Ágnes Hranitzky was Tarr's partner in life and work (film editor and co-director) since 1978 till his death. Besides her, Tarr also collaborated with Nobel Prize-winning novelist László Krasznahorkai, film composer Mihály Víg, cinematographer Fred Kelemen, and actress Erika Bók. In January 2025 he married Amila Ramović, a curator and musicologist from Sarajevo. Their professional collaboration started in 2015 when Ramović joined the faculty of film.factory.

Ágnes Hranitzky (born 4 June 1945, Derecske, Hungary) is a Hungarian film editor and film director best known for her long-standing creative partnership with her life-long partner Béla Tarr. Over several decades, she played a central role in shaping the distinctive visual and temporal style associated with Tarr’s films.