Why Kafka Couldn’t Be Told in a Straight Line | FRANZ with Agnieszka Holland

There is no straight line through the life of Franz Kafka.

FRANZ director and three-time Academy Award nominee Agnieszka Holland joins INSIDE THE ARTHOUSE for an extended conversation about Kafka and her bold, unconventional new film, a TIFF 2025 Official Selection.

Rather than trying to solve the mystery of Kafka, Holland enters it—moving through dreams, letters, loves, fears and contradictions to find the fragile, funny and fiercely determined man obscured by a century of mythology.

Past and present collide as Prague remembers Kafka, reinvents him and transforms a once-suppressed writer into a modern cultural brand. At the center is Idan Weiss, whose quietly affecting performance lets us glimpse the living man behind the literary icon.

Holland reflects on discovering The Trial as a teenager and coming to regard Kafka as an "admired brother"—someone she wanted, in her words, to bring out of the shadows and into color and light.

She also takes us inside the making of FRANZ: its restless, fragmented structure; the creative freedom that allowed her to approach the film like "quantum physics"; finding Idan Weiss; and the challenge of bringing Kafka's terrifying "In the Penal Colony" to the screen.

Along the way, Holland speaks candidly about Hollywood, the disappearance of ambitious middle-scale cinema and the artistic fearlessness she has found at this stage of her career.

What emerges is both a portrait of Kafka and a conversation about the elusive act of filmmaking itself—how we search for someone across time, how stories resist explanation and how mystery can sometimes bring us closer to the truth.

Join Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge for an intimate conversation with Agnieszka Holland about FRANZ.

FRANZ opens in U.S. theaters Friday, August 21, 2026.

Tickets, theaters and more information:

https://cohenmedia.net/product/franz