New Movie About Franz Kafka Gets Highest Amount in State Funding Allocation

The Oscar-winning director Agnieszka Holland received the biggest production grant of 22 million CZK for her new project Franz in the latest session of the Czech Film Fund.

The results were announced on 8 March 2023.

Inspired by Franz Kafka’s life and work, the film produced by German Xfilms and Polish Metro Films will also involve production companies.

A total of 24 feature film projects applied and seven projects were selected, including new films by Jitka Rudolfová, Šimon Holý, Vojtěch Strakatý and Adam Martinec.

Šárka Cimbalová is set to produce the feature. “‘Franz will be a dazzling kaleidoscopic mosaic of a film that dramatizes the famous writer’s life and imagination in a series of standalone vignettes that span Kafka’s life from his birth in pre-war Prague, up to his tragic death in Austria in 1924 and into scenes from the future he envisioned,” the trio said in a statement.

Holland has previously been nominated for an Oscar for best foreign language film for In Darkness and last year her feature Charlatan, about Czechoslovak healer Jan Mikolášek, was shortlisted in the same category.

“Kafka was a man of great sensitivity and ill-suited to his time,” Holland said in a statement.

“We have a much better chance of understanding him today than his peers had a century ago. He was the soul of the third millennium. A man living mentally largely outside the reality of his body. Living the world in letters as intensely as today’s man is living his life on social networks. To understand Kafka, we want to carefully piece together fragments from Kafka’s past and creation to create a mosaic beyond not only his life toward the present, but also to create a comprehensive view of the dramatic world of Kafka’s imagination.”