Polish author and director Agnieszka Holland mentioned her new biographical movie Franz, about creator Franz Kafka on the 59th version of the Karlovy Fluctuate Worldwide Movie Pageant (KVIFF) on Monday, saying the film tries to search out the “essence” of the novelist and explores themes which might be nonetheless topical, together with Kafka’s ideas on the risks of totalitarianism.
The filmmaker unveiled the trailer for the film, starring German actor Idan Weiss, earlier than speaking in regards to the artistic course of of the movie. The forged additionally contains the likes of Jenovéfa Boková, Peter Kurth, and Ivan Trojan. Holland wrote the script for the co-production between the Czech Republic, Poland, Germany, and France, with Marek Epstein (Charlatan), with Mike Downey serving as govt producer.
“It’s nice to see it on the display screen,” Holland mentioned after the trailer debut.
She has prior to now described Kafka as akin to a brother since studying him for the primary time at age 14. “He stayed with me as an artist, a prophet,” she defined on Monday. “First, I used to be residing in Communist Poland and in Czechoslovakia, what was Kafkaesque was the on a regular basis actuality of those international locations, of those regimes.”
She shared that Kafka’s “triple identification” additionally spoke to her as a “half-Polish, half-Jewish [person] residing in a wierd antisemitic Communist nation.” Holland additionally emphasised that Kafka was “virtually forbidden in Czechoslovakia besides for brief intervals” underneath the Communist regime.
After the autumn of communism, “within the twenty first century, slowly, Kafka grew to become the largest public vacationer attraction and the model for the [various souvenir] devices, frankly,” the filmmaker argued. The purpose of the movie is to return nearer to a solution to the query of “what’s the essence of Kafka, and the way a lot that essence has been buried beneath the favored tradition.”
The movie makes use of “an associative construction, greater than a linear” narrative construction, she added.
Holland highlighted that the themes within the movie, akin to life with a patriarch, “the jail of the household,” the “impossibility to speak” and “his worry of shut identification,” that means his unwillingness to decide on, are nonetheless present and topical, as is his “fatalism and pessimism about humanity” and “his imaginative and prescient of the risks of the way forward for totalitarian society, which is lowering the person to a non-important negligible half.”
Requested about turning into Kafka, Weiss mentioned: “He was in my physique for a very long time, and he got here out.” He locked himself into his house for 2 months and solely went out when it acquired darkish to get used to the darkness, the actor shared. “Franz for me is sensitivity,” he additionally mentioned.
In the meantime, Downey highlighted Kafka’s “rock star standing.”
Honoring the celebrated Czech author with a retrospective final 12 months, the centenary of his dying, KVIFF highlighted how filmmakers the world over have lengthy been impressed to both adapt his works outright or make motion pictures which might be “Kafkaesque,” that means that they’re stuffed with the type of angst, alienation and absurdity that made the novelist one of the crucial distinguished and distinctive figures in twentieth century literature.
KVIFF runs by means of July 12.