Lifetime Achievement Award for Béla Tarr

The European Film Academy (EFA) will award Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr with its Lifetime Achievement Award, The Hollywood Reporter reported on Wednesday.

According to the citation, the award is a tribute to Béla Tarr, who is highly respected among his colleagues and celebrated by audiences worldwide for his work as a director, as well as for his strong political views.

The Lifetime Achievement Award will be presented at the 36th European Film Awards ceremony in Berlin on December 9.

According to the EFA, Béla Tarr is the sixth film director to receive this award. Previous winners include Manoel de Oliveira, Michel Piccoli, Michael Caine, Andrzej Wajda and Costa-Gavras.

The Hollywood Reporter recalled that Tarr started his film career at the age of 16. His first feature film was 1979's ‘Family nest’. His film ‘The prefab people’ won an award at the 1982 Locarno International Film Festival. His film ‘Almanac of fall’ was released in 1984, followed by ‘Damnation’. The latter was nominated for the European Film Prize in 1988.

One of Tarr's best-known films is the 450-minute ‘Satan's tango’, based on the novel of the same title by László Krasznahorkai, which won the Caligari Prize in the Forum section of the Berlin International Film Festival in 1994. ‘Satan's tango’ is a good example of Béla Tarr's unique style, which is characterized by its rhythm and the fact that he composes his films with long, uncut black and white shots, the EFA said.

The statement also listed among Tarr's important films ‘Werckmeister Harmonies’ and ‘The London Man’. The latter, it added, is an adaptation of Georges Simenon's novel of the same name, starring Tilda Swinton, and was screened in the 2007 Competition Program at the Cannes Film Festival, which had celebrated the director as Foreign Filmmaker of the Year two years earlier.

‘The Turin Horse’ won the Silver Bear Jury Prize at the 2011 Berlinale, the FIPRESCI Prize and was nominated for the European Film Prize.