“Franz” in Trieste

The Trieste Film Festival opened with Agnieszka Holland’s Franz (2025). The film had already been noticed, enthusiastically received on the one hand and treated with doubts about its approach to the genre of biography (biopic) on the other. Some critics criticised the film for not actually showing Kafka as if he were one of the characters in his novels. The filmmaker, however, showed that the solution to the problem of perceiving the film must be sought in the conceptual definition of the object of biography. When is this object life and when is it the canonised entity of the writer, and why is the depiction of the “intertwining” of both actually impossible? We learn from the film that this is especially impossible in the case of Kafka, who emerged from Central European social pathology.

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