Agnieszka Holland on Kafka Drama ‘Franz’

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…