The enigmatic author Franz Kafka has long resisted cinematic representation, his fragmented writings and evasive persona defying the conventions of biographical storytelling.
Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland confronts this resistance directly in Franz (co-written by Charlatan´s scriptwriter Marek Epstein), not by attempting to reconstruct the author’s life in linear form, but by embracing its incompleteness. The film, premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival, presents Kafka less as a man bound to dates and places than as an unresolved presence, part literary myth, part family member, part contemporary interlocutor.
Structured as a series of intersecting vignettes that shift between Prague, Berlin, and more abstract temporal spaces, Franz uses fiction, diary fragments, documentary inserts, and stylized reconstructions from his stories mingling with past and present to piece together a portrait that is deliberately unstable and shapeshifting echoing the evasive persona of the author.
Holland has approached historical figures before, in Copying Beethoven, In Darkness, and Charlatan, but Franz departs significantly from those projects in both tone and form. Where her earlier biographical films negotiated between accuracy and interpretation, here she allows interpretation to dominate.
The strategy is consistent with her long-standing interest in Kafka, which dates back to her student years at FAMU in Prague. She first adapted The Trial for Polish television in 1981, a work she has described as intellectually formative.
Unlike her Holocaust dramas (Europa Europa, In Darkness) or her politically urgent recent feature Green Border, Franz does not anchor itself in historical events to draw warnings about present crises. Instead, it situates Kafka as a figure who anticipates and mirrors modern anxieties, an author whose contradictions, intimacy and distance, humor and dread, can only be evoked through cinematic fragmentation.
Placed in the broader context of Holland’s oeuvre, Franz highlights her recurring method of using personal histories to address collective concerns. In Burning Bush, she revisited Prague’s past to explore memory and justice, in Charlatan, she turned to the life of healer Jan Mikolášek to probe the interplay of truth and myth.
Franz extends this tendency, though here the subject is less the man himself than the perception of him: how his writings were read, misunderstood, or commodified, and how Kafka has been transformed into a cultural symbol. Holland responds to what she sees as a distorted popular image -- the moody, tormented genius -- by foregrounding elements often neglected: Kafka’s humor, his family entanglements, and his ambivalence toward becoming a literary brand.
The elliptical docu-fiction Franz centers on fragments from Kafka’s life, portrayed primarily by German actor Idan Weiss. These episodes are conveyed through his relationships with his domineering father Herman (an always angry Peter Kurth), his compliant mother Julia (Sandra Korzeniak), his supportive sister Ottla (Katharina Stark), his confidant and publisher Max Brod (Sebastian Schwarz), his fiancée Felice Bauer (Carol Schuler), and his translator and confidante Milena Jesenská (Jenovéfa Boková).
The story unfolds as a series of disparate episodes from Kafka’s life. These include an encounter with a disabled beggar, where Kafka becomes agitated over the handling of a donation, and a scene in which he reacts almost obsessively to others’ careless use of language.
The film also depicts his first public readings, along with more private moments that underline his reluctance toward intimacy and his withdrawn disposition. His time in a sanatorium is portrayed through sequences that emphasize the institution’s practice of nudism, shown with repeated male frontal nudity. Another strand follows Kafka and Brod visiting a brothel, where a fleeting sense of sentimentality is abruptly interrupted by Kafka’s neurotic diversion.
Holland’s Franz combines elements of a conventional biopic with darker interludes, including references to the Holocaust, and moments of understated humor, such as Kafka’s uneasy relationship with his authoritarian father or his awkwardness with women. The film also incorporates present-day documentary-style sequences that frame Kafka as both an elusive myth and a commercial commodity. Although the structure is fragmented and the approach unconventional, the film maintains coherence and remains accessible to mainstream audiences with slightly adventurous taste.
The episodes follow one another without clear transitions, creating a collage-like rhythm. Kafka is shown in both mundane and allegorical encounters: conversations with Milena Jesenská, conflicts with his father, and observations of street life that take on a parabolic quality.
Tomasz Naumiuk’s cinematography, familiar from Holland’s Green Border and Olga Chajdas' Imago, avoids overt experimentation or expressionist stylization, applying a consistent visual language across the biographical fragments, documentary inserts, and mock-interviews. His approach deliberately minimizes distinction between the dramatized episodes of Kafka’s life, the mockumentary-style testimonies from relatives and friends addressing the camera, and the contemporary documentary passages on Kafka’s commodified legacy.
Occasional visual flourishes appear, such as the use of a fish-eye lens during a sequence of paranoid fear, one of the few moments in which Holland directly connects past and present. Most of the aesthetic weight, however, is carried by the design team.
Production designer Henrich Boráros (We Have Never Been Modern), art director Anna Mayerová (Nosferatu), and set decorator Michaela Jirglová (Extraction 2) provide the film with the visual richness of a period drama, while also shaping environments that evoke both Kafka’s melancholia and moments of unexpected playfulness. Prague functions not only as a physical backdrop but also as a conceptual space, at once tangible and spectral, its surviving architectural fragments recalling Kafka’s presence and simultaneously reflecting his commodified afterlife as a tourist attraction.
Franz is less radical in its formalism, and while Kafka remains an enigma, Holland presents him more as a fallible individual than as an idol and a prophetic genius. The film foregrounds his strained relationship with his father, his unease with women, and his persistent self-doubt.
It avoids hagiography, portraying Kafka as both an original writer uncertain of his own value and a man who benefited from his background. By balancing elements of irony, vulnerability, and inevitability, Franz addresses the multiple dimensions of a figure who has long been absorbed into myth.