Cinema Arta will be showing a seven and a half hour film (450 minutes) on Sunday 15th of February in the honor of the director Bela Tarr.
Bela Tarr is a famous Hungarian director, in fact there was a retrospective of his films at last year’s TIFF (Transylvania International Film Festival.) He died in January 2026.
Sátántangó is set at the end of the communist era. According to Cinema Arta, it’s about a rural community who lives on an “abandoned farm.” Well, if they live on it, it’s not abandoned, right? Or, maybe they occupied it after it was abandoned. Irimiás, a charlatan, exploits the countrymen’s dreams to manipulate them.
As the film is in Hungarian, the sound is expected to be better than films in some foreign languages. (Hopefully, they will have a projectionist who speaks Hungarian.)
The film is inspired by a book by Nobel prize winner László Krasznahorkai.
The blog “Big Other” had a tribute to Belá Tarr, with quotes written in the director’s own words.
“Our life is happening in two dimensions: one is space, and the other is time. And that’s why I don’t like to go to the cinema, because filmmakers, or let’s say this capitalist film business, ignore time and space. They are just listening for the storytelling. What does this mean, the ‘storytelling’? When you live your life, you are doing the same things every day, almost.”
“When I started to make movies, my goal became more and more to show a kind of totality, something which shows our life in a simple way. I don’t think our life is too exceptional. It’s just going.”
Tarr went on to quote Andy Warhol’s famous, “fifteen minutes of fame” before saying that David Bowie was “more generous” in saying that “We can be heros for one day.”
Well, Belá Tarr and his characters can be stars for at least seven hours, if you sit through and watch his film. But why is the film so long? “The length of a movie all depends on what you want to say,” Tarr said, according to Big Other.
If you read more, you see what to expect. Bela Tarr is not a conventional filmmaker, he doesn’t care about stories, or at least he doesn’t think there are new stories. He claimed that real filmmakers have their own style, and own language, and urged young filmmakers to be more radical than he was.
The film is in Hungarian, but there are English and Romanian subtitles. Tickets cost 35 lei.