Polish director, three-time Oscar nominee Agnieszka Holland (Secret Garden, In the Dark) will shoot a biopic about the writer Franz Kafka.
The project has already received the name "Kafka".
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the production of the film will be handled by the team that worked on Holland's tape about the traditional healer from Czechoslovakia Jan Mikolashek "The Quack", selected in the competition of the Berlin Film Festival in 2020.
The script will be written by Marek Epstein (In the Shadows, Vaclav) with the participation of Mike Downey.
Producers include Sam Taylor, Downey and Sarka Simbalova.
The authors of the upcoming project describe it as "an amazing kaleidoscope" and "a mischievous docudrama with elements of fiction, in which nothing is impossible."
It is expected that the tape will cover the entire life of the writer from his birth to death.
In addition, the picture will include episodes from the future that the writer imagined.
Holland notes that Franz Kafka, along with Anton Chekhov, is the main writer in her life.
“Having arrived in Prague, I perceived this city through the prism of his literary works and life.
I saw Kafka everywhere and almost recognized in myself his shy nature, dual Judaism and (internal. -
RT
) contradictions, ”the website of the Czech Film Center quotes the director as saying.
Prague
Legion Media
She proposes to perceive her new film as a collage, which contains stories from the life of the writer and his books, as well as “scenes that show what happened later with people from his environment, in particular with his sister, whose death he predicted.
Scenes from contemporary Prague, where the unobtrusive presence of this man, despite his role as a tourist attraction, seems immortal.
The director notes that all this will help to reveal the difficult-to-understand personality of the writer who ordered the destruction of his works.
“The fate of his books, his awkward crushes, his relationship with his father, unsuccessful engagements, office work and tuberculosis are all well documented in his diaries, letters and numerous biographies.
We know everything.
But the mystery of his fate and the impact that his work has on the world has not yet been fully revealed, ”said Holland.
According to her, the film will present a chamber portrait of a man and a reflection of how relevant his life is today.
She describes Kafka herself as a man who belonged in soul to the third millennium and "dwelled mentally mostly outside his body."
“His deep immersion in the world of letters can be compared to how our contemporaries live their lives on social networks.
However, the purpose of his texts was not to inform and disseminate, but to find a way to oneself, ”the director noted.
Filming is scheduled for spring 2023.
Franz Kafka was born on July 3, 1883 into a Jewish family living in Prague.
The writer's father came from a Czech-speaking Jewish community and traded haberdashery, and his mother was the daughter of a brewer.
She preferred to speak German.
As a child, Kafka lost two younger brothers and remained the only son in a family with three daughters.
The writer had a difficult relationship with his parents: his mother did not understand his desire to be realized in creativity, and his father had a strong character, was a kind of tyrant and did not take his works seriously.
The father influenced the work of the writer - in the works of Kafka (the novels "The Castle" and "The Trial"), the characters often face a force that can break their will and deprive them of self-esteem.
The conflict with the father is clearly described in the story "The Sentence".
Kafka's first language was German, he also knew Czech and was fluent in French.
At the Charles University in Prague, the writer studied law, while doing art at the same time.
After university, Kafka worked for a year as an office worker, then got a job at an Italian insurance agency, where the heavy schedule left no time for creativity.
Kafka quit less than a year later and found a job in the insurance department, where he served until 1922 (the writer was forced into early retirement due to developing tuberculosis).
As a writer, Franz Kafka became known only posthumously; during his lifetime, only a few of his stories were published.
In 1912, the writer completed work on one of his most famous works - the story "Transformation", three years later it was first published.
The story, together with the stories "The Sentence" and "In the Correctional Colony", was included in the collection "Kary".
Despite health problems, Kafka continued to write.
In 1924 (according to other sources - in 1922) he finished the story "Hunger" in which one could see Kafka's laconic and clear style, inherent in him at the end of his life.
Before his death, Kafka bequeathed to his friend and writer Max Brod to destroy all his manuscripts, but he did not.
In 1925, The Trial was published, followed by The Castle the following year.
In 1927, the novel "America" was published.
Among the authors whom Kafka considered congenial to himself were the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the French prose writer Gustave Flaubert, the Austrian poet Franz Grillparzer, and the German playwright Heinrich von Kleist.
Kafka died in June 1924 near Vienna, the burial place of the writer was the New Jewish Cemetery in Prague.
A still from Steven Soderbergh's Kafka starring Jeremy Irons
© kinopoisk.ru
The life story of Franz Kafka has already been taken as the basis for biopics.
One of them was directed by Steven Soderbergh.
This tape focuses primarily on the environment that surrounded the writer in the late 1910s and had a great influence on him.
In the story, Kafka (Jeremy Irons), an employee of an insurance company, after some events, discovers a mysterious underground society.
In 1993, Peter Capaldi's short film It's a Wonderful Life of Franz Kafka was released, filmed in the comedy genre.
It tells about the process of the writer's work on "The Metamorphosis".
Kafka was played by Richard E. Grant, and the role of the protagonist of the work, Gregor Samsa, went to Crispin Letts.