Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr to receive European Film Academy’s Honorary Award

Eminent Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr will receive the Honorary Award of the European Film Academy (EFA), The Hollywood Reporter said on Wednesday.

The award is meant 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”, the EFA said.

Tarr will be presented the award at the 36th European Film Awards ceremony on Dec 9 in Berlin.

He is the sixth filmmaker to be recognised with the EFA’s Honorary Award after Manoel de Oliveira, Michel Piccoli, Michael Caine, Andrzej Wajda and Costa-Gavras.

Tarr began experimenting with filmmaking at the age of 16, The Hollywood Reporter noted. His first feature film was Family Nest in 1979. In 1982, The Prefab People received a special mention at the Locarno Film Festival. His 1988 film Damnation was nominated for the first European Film Awards. One of his best-known films, Satantango (Sátán’s Tangó), an adaptation of László Krasznahorkai’s novel of the same name, won the Caligari award of the Berlin Film Festival’s Forum section in 1994.

In 2013, Tarr founded his film.factory film school in Sarajevo before moving there in 2016.

Source: MTI