Béla Tarr’s quest for cinematic perfection made him my ideal, impossible mentor | László Nemes

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The Son of Saul director recalls how getting his first job as assistant to the austere master was a hard but inspiring lesson in the most ambitious kind of movie-making News: Hungarian director Béla Tarr dies aged 70 The last time I saw Béla Tarr was a few years ago at the Nexus conference in Amsterdam. We were invited to speak about the state of the world and of the arts. We both thought light and darkness existed in the world, even if our perception about them differed. Béla was already weakened in his body, but the spirit was still ferocious, rebellious, furious. We sat down to talk. It seemed fairly obvious this would be our ultimate, and most heartfelt, conversation. As the former apprentice, I was able to see the master one last time, with all his rage, sorrow, love and hate. I first met Béla in 2004 when he was preparing The Man from London. I wanted to learn film-making and applied to become an assistant on the film. He gave me my first real job: as an assistant, I had to fi...
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Best films of 2023 in the UK: No 4 – 20 Days in Mariupol

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Filmed as Russia invaded Ukraine’s port city, Mstyslav Chernov’s documentary is gruelling, compelling and vital

Mstyslav Chernov’s horrifying eyewitness documentary 20 Days in Mariupol is about Vladimir Putin’s brutal siege of the Ukrainian port city, from February to May 2022, resulting in more than 20,000 deaths. It is effectively the director’s cut: the gruelling unexpurgated text of this Associated Press journalist’s original video reports from within the city for western news outlets. They were, even in their packaged version, gruellingly tough – and Chernov’s images of mass graves did a very great deal, even in edited form, to galvanise western opinion and to subdue dissenting thoughts that supporting Zelenskiy wasn’t worth it and that Nato had provoked the Russians.

But the full material is wrenching: this film is really a broadcast from hell on earth. Chernov shows in unflinching detail the shattered bodies of men, women and children, and even more unbearably shows the agony of loved ones sobbing over the corpses: a blaze of emotional pain almost obscene in its directness. And Chernov and his photographer Evgeniy Maloletka are themselves part of the story. Their subjects are always reacting to their appearance: sometimes they angrily tell the film-makers to go away. But sometimes, and with almost the same kind of despairing rage, they tell them to stay, to record what they are going through, to be a witness to the horror. Ukrainian troops at one stage rescue Chernov and Maloletka from a hospital in which they had been trapped by snipers. Their capture by Russian personnel would undoubtedly have been a counter-propaganda coup for Putin.

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