Hungary’s legendary auteur Béla Tarr is ditching retirement and heading back to the big screen

Hungarian cinema icon Béla Tarr has ended his eight-year hiatus with a newly-announced return to the big screen.

Tarr, who made his retirement public in 2011, was commissioned to make a new documentary for the Wiener Festwochen film festival in Austria.

Missing People will follow the lives of men and women trapped on the edges of society, struggling to survive among Vienna’s otherwise elegant streets.

“Vienna is the city with the highest quality of living in the world,” say organisers. “[But] many inhabitants do not fit into this picture and are hidden from sight owing to poverty and social hierarchies. Béla Tarr’s Missing People makes them visible again.”

Tarr, who is perhaps best known for his seven-hour epic Sátántangó, took a step back from filmmaking after the release of his stripped-back, post-apocalyptic saga The Turin Horse. The 63-year-old worked to set up a film school in Sarajevo, but still continued to make art, creating two short films for a multimedia exhibition in Amsterdam back in 2017

Missing People will be screened between 12 and 16 June at the MuseumsQuartier, Vienna.