Overview

• Agnieszka Holland presented Franz in competition at the San Sebastián Film Festival, introducing a nontraditional take on Franz Kafka.
• The film assembles episodes from Kafka’s life with fictional and dreamlike passages to evoke a fractured identity, steering clear of literal ‘kafkaesque’ set pieces.
• Idan Weiss portrays Kafka, and the film nods to the writer’s family’s Nazi-era persecution and Prague’s modern tourist branding of his image.
• Holland used the premiere to warn that the Israel–Hamas war reflects a collapse in empathy and solidarity, tying this to social networks and the erosion of liberal democracy.
• Early festival notices describe the film as uneven, and Holland says she still receives online death threats stemming from the backlash to her 2023 film Green Border.