The Turin Horse

“Cinema’s greatest crafter of total environments dials up one of his most vividly immersive milieus.”—Slant Magazine

Hungarian director Béla Tarr, one of the defining filmmakers and greatest innovators in contemporary cinema, has declared that The Turin Horse will be his final film. The film takes as a point of departure a story about Friedrich Nietzsche witnessing a cab driver whipping his horse in Turin, Italy, in 1889 (an incident that allegedly moved him to stop speaking and become bedridden for the rest of his life). Winner of the Silver Bear at the 2011 Berlin Film Festival, Tarr’s final testament imagines the life of the cab driver and his overworked horse, slowly building to a cataclysm as the world falls to ruin. Immaculately photographed in Tarr’s renowned long takes, The Turin Horse is a stark and uncompromising vision of a wind-whipped, elegiac apocalypse. (146 mins., 35mm)