Agnieszka Holland has never shied away from difficult subjects. The Polish filmmaker, a three-time Oscar nominee (Angry Harvest, Europa Europa, In Darkness) and winner of Venice’s jury prize for Green Border, has built her career on stories of outsiders confronting oppressive systems.
Her latest, Franz, takes on one of the ultimate outsiders: Czech writer Franz Kafka. Far from a conventional biopic, the film mirrors the disjointed nature of Kafka’s life and his cryptic prose. Holland constructs a fragmented, kaleidoscopic portrait that blends real episodes with Kafka’s fiction and his strange afterlife as both cultural prophet and commercial brand.
For Holland, the project is personal. She first encountered Kafka as a teenager and later adapted The Trial for Polish television in 1981. Decades later, she still sees him as a “fragile younger brother,” a writer whose vision of dehumanization feels more urgent now than ever. With Idan Weiss as Kafka and Peter Kurth as his father, Franz marks Holland’s most ambitious attempt yet to reintroduce Kafka to a new generation.
Franz had its world premiere as a special presentation at TIFF and will screen in competition at San Sebastián. Films Boutique is handling worldwide sales.
Holland talked to THR about the lasting appeal of Kafka, casting him, and what’s next.
What draws you to Kafka’s writing, and why is he still relevant today?
The existential dimension of Kafka’s writing has always been important to me, as well as the questions he asks without answering: What are the rules that govern our lives—legal, political, philosophical, religious? His work is cryptic, which means every generation can read him differently. That is why he has remained so relevant. In fact, I think he is more relevant today than he was 20 or 30 years ago, because we are once again facing the kind of dehumanization he foresaw in the 1930s and 40s.
Kafka has also been deeply personal for me. Studying in Prague, I traced his footsteps. In 1981, I adapted The Trial for Polish television, which was one of the most exciting intellectual tasks of my career. I’ve always felt a personal connection—as if he were a fragile younger brother I had to protect. With Franz, I wanted to find a cinematic language that would capture that feeling and present him in a way that speaks to a new generation, many of whom experience the same alienation he did.
When you went back to Kafka for this film, did he mean something different to you than when you first read him?
I tried to reconnect with the feelings I had when I first discovered him as a teenager, before his image was buried under layers of interpretations, scholarship, and tourist kitsch. Kafka became a brand, even a tourist attraction, and his real humanity was hidden. I wanted to revive my original sense of him—without pretending I could capture the full truth. Kafka always escapes interpretation. Whenever you think you’ve nailed him down, he slips away. That mystery was important to preserve in the film.
Did that also impact your stylistic approach?
Yes. I knew I couldn’t make a traditional biopic. Kafka’s life and work are fragmented, so the film had to be fragmented too—piecing together shards of his fiction, his letters, and his lived experience. That approach allowed me to rediscover the freshness of my early connection to him.
Agnieszka Holland
Why does Kafka resonate so strongly with young people today?
Because he expresses what many now feel: a sense of being different, of struggling to communicate directly, of being alienated by systems—family, work, society—that are at once strict and incomprehensible. Kafka’s search for freedom from those forces, and his neuroatypical sensibility, speak to the experiences of today’s youth.
How did you cast Idan Weiss as Kafka?
He was practically unknown, a young German stage actor, but Simone Bär, our brilliant casting director, spotted him immediately. From the beginning, it was clear he was Franz. Not only physically or because he is Jewish, but because of his sensibility—his strangeness, his humor, his apartness. He truly seemed to carry Kafka’s soul. At times, it was difficult because he thought in ways different from the film crew, but I came to see that as essential. Without him, the film would not feel true.
What would Kafka make of being a tourist attraction and global brand?
He would be terrified. He had no narcissistic desire for fame. He wanted his writing to be recognized, but in mystery. At the same time, he had a great sense of humor, so he might find some of it absurdly funny. Still, I think the commodification of his name and image would have horrified him.
Kafka’s humor is often overlooked. Was it something you recognized from the beginning?
Yes. I knew it from the start. His humor is dark, painful, but very present. It was important to include that in the film.
Why did you choose to stage his short story In the Penal Colony rather than, say, The Metamorphosis or The Castle?
It was both the easiest of his stories to visualize and, for me, the most prophetic. It exposes the absurdity of institutionalized cruelty. Readers after the Second World War recognized how Kafka had foreseen the cold, legalized violence that defined the 20th century. Sadly, I think we are living through a return to that logic now, and I wanted those images in the film because they reflect what we increasingly see in the news.
What would Kafka say about the state of the world today?
It’s ironic that he died before Hitler, since he anticipated the horrors that were coming. His family lived through what he foresaw, but he escaped it. I think if he faced today’s cynical violence—wars, political brutality, dehumanization—he would not fight. Kafka wasn’t a survivor at any cost. Even with his illness, he seemed to surrender rather than struggle. Faced with our world today, I think he would simply disappear.
Did making this film change your perspective on Kafka?
It deepened my connection. The process revived my original feelings for him and gave me a new stylistic freedom. The film confirmed for me that Kafka cannot be told in a linear way. His truth exists only in fragments, in pieces.
What’s next for you?
Probably a film about Jerzy Kosiński, the Polish-American writer who was a great celebrity in the U.S. before being disgraced and who committed suicide in 1992. His story is largely forgotten now, but it feels relevant—about truth and fiction, fame and cancellation. In some ways, he was a kind of spiritual grandson of Kafka, though with a very different, more narcissistic character.
