The Sarajevo Film Festival has unveiled "Béla Tarr in Sarajevo," a long-term tribute program dedicated to the legacy of the Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr (The Hollywood Reporter).

The inaugural lineup is built around a single thread: every film selected was made by a former student of Tarr's Film Factory, an experimental doctoral-level film school that operated in Sarajevo from 2013 to 2017. Tarr founded the programme in 2012 and led its BA, MA and DLA courses at the Sarajevo School of Science and Technology, with classes officially beginning in February 2013 (Sarajevo Film Festival).

Ten titles make up the first edition. They range across continents and sensibilities. Lamb, from Iceland's Valdimar Jóhannsson, follows a childless couple who make an alarming discovery in their sheep barn. Naval Gays, by the UK's Grant Gulczynski, is a meta-project about a filmmaker with low self-esteem who crafts a movie about sex, the body and himself. The full list also includes Cenote (Kaori Oda), Firewood (Manel Raga Raga), Love Dog (Bianca Lucas), Motherhood (Pilar Palomero), Soil and Wings (Stefan Malešević), The Bridge (Léa Triboulet), Travesias (Sergio Flores Thorija), and Who the Fuck Are You (Marina Radmilac) (The Hollywood Reporter).

The connection between Tarr and Sarajevo runs deep. The festival's Tribute To programme featured a retrospective of his work back in 2006. He received the Honorary Heart of Sarajevo in 2013, and served as president of the jury for the narrative feature selection in 2014 (The Hollywood Reporter). A 4K restoration of his landmark Sátántangó screened at the festival's 25th edition (Sarajevo Film Festival). Tarr started working in film as an amateur at sixteen (Sarajevo Film Festival).

Jovan Marjanović, the festival's director, oversees a programme designed not as a one-off retrospective but as an ongoing initiative — one that channels Tarr's teaching legacy into a visible, recurring platform for the film-makers he shaped (The Hollywood Reporter).

The school's reach has echoed elsewhere, too. Amsterdam's Eye Filmmuseum has hosted a programme called "Reminiscenses of Béla Tarr's film.factory," with three former students discussing their time at the school (Eye Filmmuseum).

What makes this stand out is the structure. Most festival tributes look backward — a career retrospective, a prize, a montage of clips. This one looks forward through the people Tarr taught, treating a teacher's influence as something worth programming in its own right.