This year, Cinema City will host a cult film author, a Hungarian director Béla Tarr. The festival will present a retrospective of his work, as well as his new film – The Turin Horse. Cinema City, an international film festival, which takes place from June 18 – 25 in Novi Sad, welcomes hundreds of filmmakers from the country and abroad every year. This year, a special guest of the Cinema City festival will be one of the most prominent contemporary filmmakers, a Hungarian director Béla Tarr. The audience will have an opportunity to see some of his works that made film history, and a chance to meet this important artist in a panel discussion after the screening.
One of the films from his opus, which will be shown at the Cinema city festival, is his latest achievement - The Turin Horse. It premiered at this year’s Berlinale, where it received three awards – the Silver bear, the Jury Grand Prix, and a Fispresci award. This artistic drama is related to a famous alleged incident in Turin, in which a famous philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, out of compassion for a beaten horse experienced a nervous break down that left him confined to his bed and robbed him of the ability to speak till the day he died.
''As the background voice is leading us into the story, the screen before us is dark. A furious incredible music by Mihály Vig follows, and keeps haunting a long take of a horse racing through the storm. It is a vision of a twisted cosmic agony… the apocalypse. What ensues is Béla Tarr’s account of 6 days in the life of the horse and its owner, in which he manages to transform the simplest moves into powerful rituals, the last ray of light in the world buried in oblivion. “ This is how Tiziana Finzi, the Cinema City selector this year, describes Tarr’s artistic ‘apocalyptic and poetic vision of the world and life’.
Béla Tarr announced the film The Turin Horse as the last one in his rich opus, expressing his wish to create new space for the young film artists. He says that his future career lies in the production business, which would support young filmmakers.
Béla Tarr got into filmmaking as an amateur when he was 16. His early work soon attracted the attention of the Hungarian studios. His well-known TV adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth proved that his work gained a distinct visual identity and metaphysical perspective, reminiscent of Andrei Tarkovski’s work. Soon after this, he created his most famous films: Damnation, followed by the legendary several-hour film Satan’s Tango, which took him seven years to complete, and then the more recent work, such as Werkmeister Harmonies, Prologue and the Man from London.
As part of the homage to Béla Tarr, in addition to The Turin Horse, the Cinema City’s audience will have an opportunity to see the author’s famous Hotel Magnezit, Family Nest, Outsider, Macbeth, The Prefab People, Almanac of Fall, Damnation, Journey on a Plain, Werkmeister Harmonies, and Prologue. After the screening of The Turin Horse the audience will have a unique opportunity to talk to the author.
