Film director Bela Tarr passes away after 'serious illness'

Legendary Hungarian film director Bela Tarr, who was best known for the movie "Satantango", has died at the age of 70.

As per the AFP, Hungary´s national news agency reported Tarr death citing a statement director Bence Fliegauf made on behalf of the family.

"It is with deep sorrow that we announce that film director Bela Tarr passed away early this morning after a long and serious illness" local news site quoted the statement as saying.

Tarr was best known for the movie "Satantango" (1994), a seven-hour epic about the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and its material and spiritual decline.

It was adopted from one of Nobel laureate writer Laszlo Krasznahorkai´s best known novels, with whom he frequently collaborated.

Tarr "created colours by making them disappear, because in his great films he tried to speak as the sinner who nevertheless, with all his sins, must still be loved" Krasznahorkai said last year in a speech after receiving his Nobel prize.

Bela was born in the southern Hungarian university town of Pecs in 1955.

He started filmmaking as an amateur at the age of 16 with a camera his father gifted to him.

Tarr then joined Hungary´s leading experimental film studio Bela Balazs Studio, which enabled him to make his first feature film, "Family Nest", in 1977.

He made the first Hungarian independent feature film, "Damnation", which was screened at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1988.