Franz

The ratio of words written by Franz Kafka and those written about him is estimated to be one to ten million. Born to a middle-class German and Yiddish-speaking Czech Jewish family in Prague in 1883, Kafka – who wrote now-celebrated novels and short stories in his brief forty years – is universally regarded as a major figure of the twentieth century.

In Franz, we meet Kafka as a young man – a lawyer working in insurance – navigating his passion for literature while balancing the responsibilities of being a son and future husband in a conservative yet economically troubled society on the verge of World War I. Possessing talent for blending realism and fantasy as well as a fondness for savagely worded criticisms of bureaucracies, Kafka’s world was compressed by a long battle with tuberculosis.

Often citing Kafka as a major influence, Agnieszka Holland – who studied in the former Czechoslovakia, witnessed the Prague Spring of 1968, and was imprisoned for supporting the local dissident movement – brilliantly surmounts the framework of a standard biopic.

Franz toggles between Kafka’s rich yet fleeting life and present day, where in a docu-like manner we see how his name is used to sell everything from hamburgers to key chains – a Kafkaesque turn of events if there ever was one. (source: www.tiff.net)