WER WAR KAFKA?

Franz Kafka is one of the most significant writers of the 20^th century. But who really was Kafka? Director Richard Dindo approaches the inscrutable personality of the man and artist through passages from his diaries and letters. In staged monologues, Kafka himself reads excerpts from these personal and beautiful texts. Incarnated by actors and actresses, the people who knew him best at different stages of his life share their memories with us: Max Brod, a friend from Kafka’s youth and successful writer; Gustav Janouch, a poet and admirer; Milena Jesenska, his lover; Felice Bauer, his fiancée, and Dora Diamant, his companion during the last years of his life. What emerges is an oppressive psychogram of a man who was foreign to this world, lonely, afflicted by anxiety, an eternal fiancé, an insurance broker and a writer. Wer war Kafka is a poetic quest to uncover the myth of Kafka. It is an emotional dedication to the enigmatic and exceptional writer of Jewish descent who claimed that he had an “infinite world in his mind” and perceived his life as a “hesitant birth”.

"With this film on Kafka, I should like to continue my work on writers to go even further in the description of a life and its events by making a film about a unique, secretive and exceptional man, a man of legend, a man who perhaps wrote the most beautiful letters in the history of literature, along with those of Gustave Flaubert, a writer that Kafka admired enormously.“ Richard Dindo