Franz

An impressive story inspired by the life, work, and imagination of writer Franz Kafka, who managed to fascinatingly outrun his time. Vegetarian, workaholic, introvert, outsider, lover of letters, and clerk in a nightmare.

The film FRANZ is full of imagination, humour, pain, and the inner world of a man who defined modern existential anxiety in his books and, even a hundred years after his death, remains a mirror of our deepest fears and desires. Director Agnieszka Holland composes a kaleidoscope of events from fragments, dreams, letters, and preserved stories. The result is a sensually intense portrait of a man who never stopped searching for himself, and in doing so touched something essential in all of us.

The film begins with Kafka's childhood in Prague and follows his life until his death in Austria after World War I. From his relationship with his authoritarian father to his close friendship with Max Brod and his complicated love affairs with Felicia Bauer and Milena Jesenská, a rich, emotional, often ironic, and at times grotesque fresco emerges of a man who, in his desire for an "ordinary" life, managed to write the most extraordinary works.