The celebrated Hungarian director, Bela Tarr's passing at the age of 70, has moved the internet. Read on to know more about his wife.
The famous Hungarian filmmaker and director, Bela Tarr, passed away at the age of seventy. His death has caused a stir on the internet, as the world knows him as a legend. At the age of seventy, he died due to a mysterious and long illness. Tarr's death was announced on January 6, 2026. Filmmaker, Bence Flieguaf, revealed that Bela Tarr passed away after a long and serious illness. Read on to know more about his family.
Bela Tarr's wife, Agnes Hranitzky, is a film editor and started her journey in the 1970s by working on Hungarian films. She also collaborated with director Bela Tarr in 1981. She edited his film, The Outsider, after which she started editing all of his films. It was in 2000 when Agnes started directing films with her husband, and their first film was Werkmeister Harmonies. She even got credit for the same. The reason behind her co-direction was that Hranitzky had to be on set during production to assist her husband, Tarr, and to understand how things would develop during the editing process, and which takes were the best.
In 2007, she co-directed yet another film with her husband, who served as the lead director. It premiered at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival. In 2011, she yet again took the director's role for the film, The Turin Horse, and it premiered 2011 at the 61st Berlin International Film Festival, and it was awarded the Jury Grand Prix. However, in 2012, their collaboration ended as Bela Tarr retired from filmmaking. It is worth mentioning that not much is known about Bela Tarr and his wife, Agnes Hranitzky's love story, or when they got married, as they kept their personal life extremely private. Talking about their children, the two didn't have any biological children.
Once, his wife called their collaboration 'just perfect'. Bela Tarr once talked about collaborating with his wife, Agnes, on the film set. He stated that his wife was always on set and would shout at him several times when she thought the rhythm of something was off. He said:
"When you’re doing long takes sometimes a take takes 10 minutes. Afterwards, you cannot do anything on the editing table. Because you just cut the first frame and the last frame and you put it together. And then it’s ready! The real editing is on set. Agnes (Béla Tarr’s wife and editor) was always on set. She watched everything on the monitor and she would shout at me, several times, when she thought something with the rhythm or something else was wrong."
The iconic Hungarian filmmaker, Bela Tarr, was a member of the European Film Academy since 1977. He passed away on January 6, 2026, after battling a long and serious illness. However, no details about his illness were revealed, except that he had been suffering for a long time. The academy issued a statement which can be read as:
"The academy mourns 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 grieving family requests privacy and asks the media not to seek any statement from the family members during their difficult time. Bela Tarr was famously known for his hypnotic filmmaking. He was the pioneer of slow cinema with monochrome films and minimal dialogue. His work, which brought him considerable success, is Satantango, released in 1994 and depicting life in a Hungarian village after the fall of communism. It is the greatest film ever produced.
Talking about Bela Tarr's early life, he was born in 1955, and started making films as a hobby during his teens. Initially, he would direct socially grounded dramas such as Family Nest and The Prefab People. Bela Tarr graduated in 1982 and founded his own Filmstudio. He worked there till 1985, until it closed. His first film, which gained international love, was his feature film, Damnation, in 1988. It premiered at the Berlin Film Festival and won him the Best Young Film Award at the European Film Awards.
Bela Tarr went on to make nine features, and the final one was Turin Horse, which was released in 2011, and it won the Jury Prize at Berlin. Apart from filmmaking, Bela Tarr also worked as a visiting professor at several film academies, including Filmakademie BW Ludwigsburg, Le Fresne. In 2023, he also received the European Film Academy's Honorary Award. Once in an interview, Bela Tarr talked about his love for filmmaking and said:
"Film-making is like a drug and I’m still a junkie! But I want to work with the young people because I just want to push them to be themselves, to be free, to be more revolutionary than I was. My slogan is very, very simple: no education – just liberation!"
We pray for the strength of Bela Tarr's family as they deal with his passing after a long illness.
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