You don’t need to have read Kafka to know what “Kafkaesque” means — the idea that the world is a nightmare, a sick joke at your expense, continues to resonate a century after the writer died. Franz Kafka’s “uneasy dreams” have inspired filmmakers like Orson Welles, David Lynch, Michael Haneke, Terry Gilliam, and Roman Polanski, to name just a few, and now Agnieszka Holland has taken the bull by the horns and delivered a biopic that’s Kafkaesque and then some.
Holland blends scenes from Kafka’s life as a German Jew in Austro-Hungarian Prague with dramatizations his short stories and — at the film’s most surreal — documentary footage of Kafka’s present-day tourist economy (“Who will join me for a Kafka burger?”). Franz is densely layered but lively, and Holland hits the jackpot with newcomer Idan Weiss, whose tragicomic presence suggests a persecuted clown somewhere between Charlie Chaplin and Adrien Brody.
Oscar Submission: Poland
Supported by
Media Partner
Idan Weiss, Jenovéfa Boková, Peter Kurth, Ivan Trojan, Sandra Korzeniak, Katharina Stark
Czech Republic/Germany/
Poland
2025
In German and Czech with English subtitles
Book Tickets
Credits & Director
Executive Producer
Mike Downey, Kevan Van Thompson, Daniel Bergmann, Jeff Field, Emir Külal Haznevi
Producer
Agnieszka Holland, Šárka Cimbalová, Uwe Schott, Jorgo Narjes, Marcin Wierzchoslawski, Alicja Jagodzinska
Screenwriter
Marek Epstein
Cinematography
Tomasz Naumiuk
Editor
Pavel Hrdlicka
Production Design
Henrich Boráros
Original Music
Mary Komasa, Antoni Komasa Lazarkiewicz
Agnieszka Holland
Agnieszka Holland began her film career as an assistant director to Krzysztof Zanussi and Andrzej Wajda as her mentor. Her first feature film, Provincial Actors (1978), was one of the flagship pictures of the “cinema of moral disquiet” and winner of the International Critics Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1980. She is a three-time Academy Award nominee for her films Angry Harvest (1985) and In Darkness (2011), both nominated for Best Foreign-Language Film, and Europa Europa (1990), which was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay. Holland has also directed numerous episodes of notable TV series.
Filmography: In Darkness (2011); Spoor (2017); Mr. Jones (2019); Charlatan (2020); Green Border (2023)
Photo by Marlene Film Production
Missing VIFF? Check out what's playing at the VIFF Centre
The Mother and the Bear
Johnny Ma’s film stars Kim Ho-jung as a Korean woman who flies to Winnipeg when her immigrant daughter is hospitalized there. This crowd-pleaser plays up cultural differences to hilarious effect and offers a touching take on mother-daughter tension.
Afternoons of Solitude
Pacification director Albert Serra turns his unflinching gaze on the subject of bullfighting, and in particular the famous young matador Andrés Roca Rey. The film challenges us to look its subject square in the eye and draw our own conclusions.
The Plague
At a water polo camp, Ben is plunged into the deep end of toxic peer pressure. Terrified of incurring his campmates’ wrath, he joins them in tormenting a kid whose skin rash has been branded “the plague”. But then he experiences a breakout of his own...
The Executioner
Regularly cited as the greatest Spanish film ever made, Berlanga's masterpiece is a pitch black comedy about an undertaker lined up by the state executioner to marry his beautiful daughter -- but he'll also have to inherit the old man's job.