Lajos Koltai
Lajos Koltai in 2013
Born	(1946-04-02)2 April 1946 (age 79) Budapest,Hungary
Years active	1965–2020

Lajos Koltai, ASC, HSC, (born 2 April 1946) is aHungariancinematographer andfilm director, best known for his work with directorsIstván Szabó andGiuseppe Tornatore.

His work inMalèna earned him a nomination for theAcademy Award for Best Cinematography.

Born at the beginning of theCold War, he became interested in film at a very young age, though in Hungary at the time, film containing subversive content was heavily censored. He shot his first short on aSuper 8 film camera at the age of 14 and began to draft short scripts and turn them into movies starring friends and family. One year he won first and second prizes at a local amateur film festival, and coincidentally another young filmmaker,István Szabó, was the head of the jury. Koltai graduated from the School of Drama and Film in Budapest, a school known for nurturing such legends asVilmos Zsigmond andLászló Kovács.

Still early in his career he gained international recognition during his collaborations with Szabó, namely his filmMephisto, which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and the cult political classic "Angi Vera" by Pal Gabor. At this point the international film community was starting to take notice of these Eastern European films. While Hollywood was at the peak of creativity a decade before after several decades of turning out films that didn't face the same restrictions as in these parts of the world, the Hungarian artistic spirit was beginning to find its place in the world, and many Hungarian directors were confronting truths about their country's tainted Nazi-affiliated history . What followed was several artistic and political masterpieces, the teen-orientedTime Stands Still (1982), a film many considered to be well ahead of its time,Cannes Film Festival winnerColonel Redl (1985), which garnered yet another Oscar nomination, andHanussen, another political drama loosely based on the rise of Hitler.

In 1995 at the19th Moscow International Film Festival he won the Special Silver St. George for the Director of Photography for his work on the filmMario and the Magician.^[1]

Around this time Koltai decided to make the move to the United States, a dramatic departure for any European filmmaker, let alone cinematographer, though clearly many opportunities lied in the Hollywood playing field. So he joined theAmerican Society of Cinematographers (ASC) and began to compile an impressive body of work, notablyLuis Mandoki'sWhite Palace,Wrestling Ernest Hemingway,Born Yesterday,When a Man Loves a Woman,Just Cause,Jodie Foster'sHome for the Holidays, andJack Lemmon andWalter Matthau's last film togetherOut to Sea. While none of these films had a particularly signature or even beautiful style (save perhaps Mandoki'sWhite Palace), due to the cookie-cutter industry standards Hollywood notoriously places over artistic license, it was around this time that another fateful collaboration took place, and that would be with Giuseppe Tornatore, the legendary director ofCinema Paradiso.The Legend of 1900 would be their first film together, a story about a piano player who was born and raised on a steam boat. Tornatore brought out some of Koltai's best work by allowing an actual creative collaboration to take place on set, instead of the cinematographer just taking orders from the director, and the result is what many (including Koltai himself) consider to be his most beautiful work. This led to a career high for any cinematographer, being nominated for an Academy Award for Tornatore's sweeping love storyMalèna in 2000.^[2]

In 2004 Koltai directed his first film, theHolocaust dramaFateless (Sorstalanság), based on thenovel by the same name byNobel Prize winning writerImre Kertész. It was released in Hungary in February 2005 with moderate success and it was released in theUnited States in the fall of 2005. It has had much exposure and success on thefilm festival circuit premiering at theTelluride Film Festival,Karlovy Vary International Film Festival,Chicago Film Festival, theLos Angeles Film Festival, theWashington Jewish Film Festival,The Boston Jewish Film Festival, theToronto International Film Festival, theWoodstock Film Festival, the Berlinale, orBerlin Film Festival, where it was nominated for the prestigious Golden Berlin Bear, and countless others. It was also nominated for Best Score (Ennio Morricone) and Best Cinematography (Gyula Pados) at the European Film Awards, and Hungary nominated it for the 2006Academy Awards, but out of the list of 58 countries as potential nominees for Best Foreign Film, it didn't make it to the final five.

Koltai finalized his first American directing deal forFocus Features, on the filmEvening, scripted bySusan Minot (Stealing Beauty) andMichael Cunningham (The Hours). Shooting took place summer 2006 inRhode Island. ActressesClaire Danes,Toni Collette,Vanessa Redgrave andMeryl Streep star in the movie.

Koltai's next projects areAline & Wolfe, andSpider Dance. The former, which is scheduled to commence principal photography in 2009, tells the story of American writer Thomas Wolfe (1900–1938,Look Homeward, Angel) and his tumultuous affair with the much older and married arts patron andBroadway set designer Aline Bernstein, who is credited with inspiring Wolfe's writing career.Spider Dance is based upon the life ofLola Montez; focusing on her travels inAustralia and is set for release in Christmas 2010.

He directed the 2023 film Semmelweis, a biopic about the life of 19th-century physicianIgnaz Semmelweis, which Hungary selected to recommend for nomination in the International Feature Film category at the 2025 Academy Awards.^[3]

Documentary short

TV movies

TV series

• Fateless (2005)
• Evening (2007)
• Semmelweis [hu] (2023)

Academy Awards

Berlin International Film Festival

Camerimage

Chicago International Film Festival

David di Donatello

European Film Awards

• Lajos Koltai atIMDb

• 1946 births
• Living people
• David di Donatello winners
• European Film Award for Best Cinematographer winners
• German-language film directors
• Hungarian cinematographers
• Film people from Budapest

• Articles with short description
• Short description is different from Wikidata
• Articles with hCards