The Last Boat is Bela Tarr’s contribution to the film project City Life by Dirk Rijneke and Mildred van Leeuwaarden.

Filmmakers who regularly appeared at the Rotterdam Film Festival with their work were invited to contribute to City Life The International Episode Film, in which the filmmakers’ cities played the leading role.
This resulted in a total of 12 portraits of cities with a running time of four hours.
In addition to Tarr (Budapest), there were contributions from Krzysztof Kieslowski (Warsaw), Mrinal Sen (Calcutta), and Carlos Reichenbach (São Paulo).

The Last Boat, was written by László Krasznahorkai, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2025. Mihály Víg created the soundscapes for this work.

The Last Boat is one of Béla Tarr’s first slow cinema film. The film was shot in Budapest 1988.
According to Tarr himself, he was inspired by the work of Andrey Tarkovsky, (The Sacrifice ) Robert Bresson’s work and also Voro Nova * by Dirk Rijneke & Mildred v Leeuwaarden played an important role in his choice for the slow cinema.
Afther The last Boat and Damnationhe focused entirely on slow cinema and made it his trademark with great success.

The Last Boat is one of Béla Tarr’s unique early masterpieces, and without this film, his oeuvre would not be complete.

The rights to the film are held by Rijneke & van Leeuwaarden, who also own all the original negatives from this film project including the work from Bela Tarr and Krzysztof Kieslowski.

Note:
*Voro Nova was the IFFR opening film in 1984 and was one of Hubert Bal’s favorite films, which he programmed in the last program he compiled for the international film forum in Riga in 1988 before he dies. The other films he selected where Chen Kaige Huag Tudi and Werner Schroeter Der Rosenkoenig and Himatsuri by Mitsua Yanagimachi and Robert Bresson’s  L’Argent.