János Derzsi

Hungarian actor Janos Derzsi is best known internationally for his work with slow cinema auteur Béla Tarr. Derzsi has co-starred in several of Tarr's productions, including an early performance in the 1982 television adaptation of "Macbeth." The film, which only runs 72 minutes, is composed of only two shots and marked the beginning of a new phase in Tarr's career. Derzsi continued working with Tarr and next appeared in the 1984 film "Almanac of Fall," about a group of people living in the flat of an ill elderly woman. Derzsi plays the lowlife son of the older woman. Derzsi also appeared in two of Tarr's most acclaimed films, the seven-hour masterwork "Satantango," about the effects of the end of Communism on a small rural community, and in "The Werckmeister Harmonies," about a rural town whose residents become fixated on a traveling circus that comes to the village showcasing a bizarre giant whale corpse. In "The Turin Horse," what Tarr has deemed his last film, Derzsi gets his most substantial role yet with the Hungarian director, starring as a farmer, Ohlsdorfer, who lives with his daughter in the harsh countryside, living out their lives doing backbreaking farm work and mundane chores while waiting for the end to come.