Polish author and director Agnieszka Holland mentioned her new biographical movie Franz, about creator Franz Kafka on the 59th version of the Karlovy Range Worldwide Movie Pageant (KVIFF) on Monday, saying the film tries to search out the “essence” of the novelist and explores themes which are 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 solid 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 previously 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 dwelling 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 id” additionally spoke to her as a “half-Polish, half-Jewish [person] dwelling 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 aim 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, corresponding to life with a patriarch, “the jail of the household,” the “impossibility to speak” and “his concern of shut id,” which 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 decreasing the person to a non-important negligible half.”
Requested about changing 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 yr, the centenary of his loss of life, KVIFF highlighted how filmmakers the world over have lengthy been impressed to both adapt his works outright or make motion pictures which are “Kafkaesque,” which means that they’re stuffed with the form of angst, alienation and absurdity that made the novelist probably the most outstanding and distinctive figures in twentieth century literature.
KVIFF runs via July 12.