Sarajevo Film Festival has unveiled a new program in honor of the late Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr.
The selection, titled Béla Tarr in Sarajevo, is a long-term initiative dedicated to the legacy of Tarr, who died earlier this year at the age of 70. The films selected to take part are made by his former students at the Film Factory in Sarajevo. Tarr’s scheme was an international, experimental doctoral school for film studies that ran from 2013 to 2017 in the Bosnian capital.
More than a retrospective, the program celebrates Tarr’s contribution to world cinema, but also to generations of authors who, through their own films, “continue to carry the spirit of curiosity, rigour and cinematic freedom that found a home in Sarajevo.”
“The selection reflects careers that have since taken these filmmakers to many of the world’s leading festivals, including Cannes, San Sebastián, Locarno, Rotterdam and Clermont-Ferrand,” said Jovan Marjanović, director of the Sarajevo Film Festival. “Rather than revealing a single aesthetic or cinematic school, their films reflect an educational philosophy that encouraged every filmmaker to discover a distinctly personal artistic language.”
Tarr was a longstanding friend of the Sarajevo Film Festival. In 2006, the Tribute To Program featured a retrospective of his selected works. He received the Honorary Heart of Sarajevo at the fest in 2013, and the following year served as president of the jury for the narrative feature film selection.
