Franz
How do you make sense of Franz Kafka? With fictional interviews with Kafka’s friends and family and thrilling plunges into his fiction, Franz does not explain, but playfully and inventively explores the man and his work.
Tickets
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Friday, May 8, 2026
- Limited Availability
- On Standby
- Matinee
Sunday, May 10, 2026
- Limited Availability
- On Standby
- Matinee
How do you make sense of Franz Kafka? He was an author who published extremely little and tasked his executor with burning his remaining works; a Jew deeply invested in ancestral culture but mostly indifferent to religion; a German-speaker from Prague; a successful but lackadaisical bureaucrat; a brilliant but self-conscious conversationalist; an unspeakably awkward but passionate lover; and an inventor of inscrutable but deeply felt fictions that have teased and maddened the world. Franz playfully explores all these sides of the man and his work. Fictional interviews with Kafka's friends and family let us into his lively social and romantic life—something impossible to imagine from his writing. And rather than talking about Kafka's work, director Holland plunges us into it, with inventive dramatizations of some of his strangest tales. The contemporary Kafka industry in Prague, among the world's most Kafkaesque phenomena, is a fitting pendant for this free investigation of Kafka's life and work. Best of all, the film doesn't pretend to understand its endlessly enigmatic subject. As a museum guide points out in the film, the ratio of words Kafka wrote to words written about him is currently 1:10 million.
—Martin Schwartz
- Director: Agnieszka Holland
- Principal Cast: Idan Weiss, Peter Kurth, Jenovefa Bokova, Ivan Trojan, Sandra Korzeniak
- Country: Czech Republic, Poland, Germany, France, Turkey
- Year: 2025
- Running Time: 127 min.
- Producer: Šarka Cimbalova, Agnieszka Holland
- Screenplay: Marek Epstein, Agnieszka Holland
- Cinematographers: Tomasz Naumiuk
- Editors: Pavel Hrdlicka
- Music: Mary Komasa, Antoni Lazarkiewicz
- Website: Official Film Website
- Awards: Official Academy Awards® Submission 2026 (International Feature), Gdynia Polish Film Festival 2025 (Best Film, Best Actor, Outstanding Cinematography, Best Make-up)
- Filmography: Green Border (2023), Charlatan (2021), Mr. Jones (2019), Spoor (2017), Burning Bush (2013), In Darkness (2011), Janosik: A True Story (2009), Copying Beethoven (2006), Julie Walking Home (2002), The Third Miracle (1999), Washington Square (1997), Total Eclipse (1995), The Secret Garden (1993), Olivier, Olivier (1992), Europa Europa (1990), To Kill a Priest (1988), Angry Harvest (1985)
- Language: German, Czech
- Has Subtitles: Yes
- US Distributor: Cohen Media Group
- International Sales: Films Boutique