Holland’s Franz Treats Kafka as a Prague Souvenir

Agnieszka Holland’s Franz, a Kafka biopic that opened in American theaters on August 21, keeps cutting from 1900s Prague to tourists buying the writer’s name. Several U.S. notices treated those jumps as a film that lost its way. Holland has been saying, for a year, that the gift shop is the story.

The 127-minute American theatrical release from Cohen Media Group stars Idan Weiss as Franz Kafka, with Daniel Dongres as the boy. It is a Czech, German and Polish film that already played Toronto, San Sebastián, and a full European run in 2025. The American delay put it in front of viewers who still wanted a straight life of the author of The Trial. Holland declined to shoot that movie.

Holland Shot Kafka as a Souvenir

Holland first read Kafka at 14. She later adapted The Trial for Polish television in 1980. She has called him a fragile younger brother she once fantasized she could save. By the time she went back to Prague to film, the brother had been replaced by a logo.

She told an interviewer ahead of the Toronto premiere that Kafka had “changed into some kind of a brand,” and that “the fragile existence of that human being had somehow disappeared under that pile of information, facts and kitsch.” The line is the movie’s thesis, not a press-note flourish. Screenwriter Marek Epstein first brought her a classical cradle-to-grave script. She sent it back and made him smash it into fragments, letters, dreams, and two centuries occupying the same street.

I felt such a strong connection to Kafka since practically my late childhood that I had the pretentious assumption that I somehow understood him better, even if it was more through intuition than literary analysis, and it was exciting to try to find the cinematic key to tell this biography, which we knew from the beginning could not be told in the regular, classical, biopic, linear way.

Agnieszka Holland, director, Toronto interview

She also called the structure “a bit punky,” closer to quantum physics than to a prestige life story, and described the finished object as a whimsical fictional docudrama in which nothing is impossible. On Rotten Tomatoes, 75 percent of 59 critic reviews are positive, with an average of 7.1 out of 10. Metacritic’s 64 from nine reviews sits in the mixed-to-favorable band. The American pans that stick are almost all about the same cut: out of Kafka’s room, into a tour group.

A Rotating Head Outside a Shopping Mall

David Černý’s Head of Franz Kafka stands outside the Quadrio mall in Prague, a 10.6-metre stack of 42 rotating stainless-steel layers installed on October 31, 2014. Critics of the sculpture have called it a billboard for the shops. Holland put it in the movie anyway. She said she is sure Kafka, who loved new machines, would have liked that turning head, and that his father Hermann would have been the happiest man on the planet to watch a “failure” become a commercial hit.

The rest of the souvenir circuit is not a metaphor. It is a route.

WHAT PRAGUE SELLS UNDER HIS NAME

• The museum: The Franz Kafka Museum opened in summer 2005 at Hergetova Cihelna, Cihelná 2b, in Malá Strana, and still runs a two-part show of first editions, letters, diaries, and audiovisual rooms.
• The statue: Černý’s kinetic head turns all day beside a mall, on a site near the savings bank where Kafka once worked.
• The burger: A tour in the film stops at a Kafka Burger for the vegetarian’s supposed favorite meal; Holland said the real stand is gone and the site is a hummus cafe.
• The gadgets: After 1989, she said, Czechs “made everything possible out of him: monuments, a museum, and millions of gadgets.”

Under the Communists he was treated as a bourgeois, degenerate writer and rarely published. Holland followed live tours while preparing the film and found some guides careful and others talking, in her word, “bullshit.” Emma Smetana plays the on-screen guide, switching languages as the group moves from Golden Lane to the museum to the fake lunch. The gag has a receipt.

Idan Weiss Almost Quit Before the Audition

Weiss was a German stage actor with almost no film work when the late casting director Simone Bär put him in the first batch of tapes. Holland, shooting in Prague, wrote to Bär asking for a meeting and got silence. After two weeks she called the German producers and learned Bär had died of cancer. Weiss, she has said, was Bär’s last gift.

He had already drafted a letter to his agent saying he was done with acting. He left it unsent. Six weeks later the Kafka tape arrived. Holland wanted a German-Jewish actor who looked like the photographs and did not play the gloomy cliché. Two other German Kafka projects around the 2024 centenary of the writer’s death had already cast their leads without finding him.

Weiss smiles. He rows. He reads aloud with pleasure, a habit a classmate, Hugo Hecht, remembered from school, when Kafka could make Ovid and Homer sound alive. U.S. viewers used to Jeremy Irons in Steven Soderbergh’s 1991 Kafka, or to the hollow-eyed prophet of book-jacket lore, keep describing the performance as a shock. That shock is the point of the casting. Holland has said she does not like the cliché of Kafka as dark, moody, and depressed. Weiss is the rebuttal, and on March 14, 2026, he won the Czech Lion for best actor.

Peter Kurth, as Hermann, is the other performance the film cannot function without. He is loud, mercantile, and sure that insurance is a life. Sandra Korzeniak plays Julie, the mother who cannot broker a peace. Katharina Stark is Ottla, the youngest sister and the one Franz could stand. Carol Schuler is Felice Bauer, the fiancée he sheds in front of the family; Jenovéfa Boková is Milena Jesenská; Sebastian Schwarz is Max Brod, the friend who refused to burn the papers. Relatives of Ottla told Holland’s team the private man was not the professional depressive of the souvenir shops. Weiss plays that report.

What the Malá Strana Tour Sells

The American complaint is that the tour groups yank you out of 1912. Holland’s reply is that 1912 is already for sale. Adult admission at the museum is 300 Kč. A private guide is another 1,000 Kč, booked a week ahead, cap 25 people, in Czech, English, German, French, or Russian. The shop sells a map of Kafka’s Prague for 60 Kč and a printed museum guide for 120 Kč. That is not invented for the film.

THE SOUVENIR AGAINST THE LIFE

The Franz Kafka Museum exhibition in Malá Strana splits into “Kafka in Prague” and “Prague in Kafka,” which is also Holland’s cut pattern. German historian Katja Hoyer, in Prague in November 2025, bought a ticket on impulse and landed at the Lucerna, the old cinema Kafka used, a house that appears in the film. Watching a movie about Kafka merch in the room where he watched films is the closed circuit Holland built. The U.S. reviews that call the circuit a mistake are grading a different assignment.

Robert Aaronson, executive vice president of Cohen Media Group, called the film an extraordinary portrait that feels both epic and intimate when the company took North American rights. The trailer the distributor cut for American houses already sells the mosaic, not a Wikipedia page with costumes.

Poland’s Oscar Bet Stopped at the Shortlist

Poland named Franz its submission for Best International Feature at the 98th Academy Awards on September 15, 2025, after a shortlist that also included Chopin, Chopin! and Trains. Holland had been nominated in the category before, for In Darkness, and had seen Green Border pushed aside in an earlier cycle. Franz did not make the Academy’s December shortlist of 15 and was not nominated. The Oscar miss is not a secret about quality so much as a mismatch of form. Voters still reward the linear life. Holland spent a year telling anyone who asked that a linear Kafka would be a lie.

HOW THE FILM WAS SCORED

The Lions went to the work you can touch: Henrich Boráros’s sets, Gabriela Poláková’s makeup, Michaela Horáčková Hořejší’s clothes, and Weiss’s face. Tomasz Naumiuk’s camera, which some American notices called jittery, was nominated at Camerimage and at the Lions. A U.S. Blu-ray and DVD from Cohen Media Group, through Kino Lorber, is dated October 20, 2026, with a Holland interview in the extras. The awards cycle is over. The disc is not.

Forty Days on Streets Kafka Would Not Recognize

Principal photography started on April 12, 2024, in Prague and moved to Berlin at the end of May. The Czech Film Center logged 40 shooting days in Prague and Berlin, a short schedule for a life that runs from a boy in a noisy apartment to a dying man in a sanatorium. Šárka Cimbalová produced with Holland through Marlene Film Production, with X Filme Creative Pool in Germany and Metro Films in Poland. Money came from the Czech Audiovisual Fund, Eurimages, the Prague Audiovisual Fund, the Polish Film Institute, Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg, ZDF/ARTE, and Canal+.

Holland studied directing at FAMU in the 1960s, spent six weeks in Ruzyně prison after the Soviet invasion, and still speaks Czech. She has said that if she had tried this film in the late 1960s, Prague would have looked more like the Kafka city in readers’ heads. The 2024 city did not. The crew shot Charles Bridge, Golden Lane, Legion Bridge, the main railway station, Malá Strana, Střelecký Island, Vyšehrad, and the Faculty of Law, then built the family flat and the sanatorium from scratch because the real rooms no longer helped.

THE ROAD TO AMERICAN THEATERS

1. April 12, 2024: Cameras roll in Prague on a Czech, German, and Polish shoot that will last 40 days.
2. September 5, 2025: World premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival as a Special Presentation.
3. September 15, 2025: Poland names Franz its Oscar submission.
4. September 25, 2025: Czech theatrical opening, with Poland following on October 24.
5. December 2025: The film misses the Academy international-feature shortlist.
6. March 14, 2026: Weiss wins the Czech Lion for best actor.
7. August 21, 2026: Cohen Media Group opens the film in the United States.
8. October 20, 2026: U.S. Blu-ray and DVD street date.

The Czech, German and Polish co-production file lists German, Czech, Yiddish, French, and English on the track, which matches the Cohen Media listing. On screen, people break character and talk into the lens. Relatives and friends deliver facts as if a museum hired them. American reviewers described that device as homework. It is also how a city now explains Kafka to visitors who have 90 minutes before the next statue.

Around the 20-minute mark, Holland stages “In the Penal Colony,” the torture machine that fails while the officer remains loyal to it. She has said most of Kafka’s days were uneventful and that the radical material lived on the page, and that this story mattered after the Second World War because readers heard a prophet of the camps. The sequence is gross on purpose. Combine it with the beef close-ups, the surgical inserts, and the nude sanatorium sermon, and you have the warning label some U.S. multiplex copy never quite printed. Kafka died in 1924 at 40. His three sisters were later murdered in the Holocaust. The film does not leave that off the tour.

Soderbergh’s Kafka, with Jeremy Irons, is still the thriller people name when they want the books rather than the life; it has been hard to see for years. Holland’s Franz is the opposite object, a biography that keeps admitting it cannot finish him. “Nothing is final with Kafka,” she said. The American run will end. The hummus cafe will change its name again. The steel head will keep turning outside the mall. Weiss, in the middle of all that product, still looks like a man trying to get a sentence right.