Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr is to receive a lifetime achievement award at the 44th Cairo International Film Festival (November 13-22).
The award-winning film director, producer and screenwriter will also mentor a workshop with young Egyptian filmmakers at the festival and will separately deliver a masterclass at the event.
The festival will also screen 4K restorations of Tarr’s 2000 feature Werckmeister Harmonies and 2011 drama The Turin Horse, considered two of his finest works. This will make CIFF “one of the early platforms to screen Tarr’s newly restored film copies,” according to CIFF festival director Amir Ramses.
Born and raised in Hungary in 1955, Tarr graduated from the Budapest Theatre and Film Academy and made his directorial debut aged 22 with Family Nest in 1977. Focussing on social issues with a documentary style he followed this up with The Outsider in 1981 and The Prefab People in 1982.
His 1982 TV adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, which he filmed in just two shots, marked a new phase in his creative work and 1988’s Damnation saw the beginning of a visual style for which he has become known: a black-and-white photographic approach, and long, slow shots, which culminated in the seven-hour long adaptation of Krasznahoraki’s novel, Satantango in 1994.
The film brought him international recognition and was followed by Werckmeister Harmonies in 2000 and The Man From London in 2007, based on the novel by Georges Simenon.
The Turin Horse, which he announced several years ago as the last fiction film he will make, played in competition at the Berlinale in 2011 and was awarded the Silver Bear grand jury prize as well as the Fipresci Prize.
More recently, Tarr executive produced Valdimar Johannsson’s Icelandic supernatural drama Lamb, which played in Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2021.
Furthermore, he founded TT Filmmuheyly in 2003, an independent film workshop that operated under his leadership until 2011 and established the international film school, Film Factory, in Sarajevo in 2012, while later became a visiting professor at several film academies.
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