When it comes to celebrated Czech writer Franz Kafka, filmmakers the world over have long been inspired to either adapt his work outright or make movies that are decidedly “Kafkaesque,” filled with the kind of angst, alienation and absurdity the made the novelist one of the most prominent and distinctive figures in 20th century literature. Now, a century after his death, Prague-born Kafka will be the subject of a film retrospective at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, which will include titles from Orson Welles, , Federico Fellini and . “It’s amazing the way this writer [Kafka] has been able to influence not only literature, but cinema for so many years,” Lorenzo Esposito, co-curator of the retrospective along with Karlovy Vary artistic director Karel Och, tells The retrospective will include such classics as , which cast Anthony Perkins as the bewildered office bureaucrat Josef K.
Martin; Scorsese’s Kafkaesque New York dramedy (1985); Fellini’s ( ); Soderbergh’s (1991) and its 2021 re-edit — both starring Jeremy Irons as a set-upon insurance man and writer — alongside lesser-known adaptations like Jan Němec’s , a German TV movie. For Esposito, what set Kafka apart was a unique understanding of the human condition and how challenging — and absurd — living in the modern world can be. “In the end, what is truly disturbing about Kafka, and what brings him so close to all of us, is not only that he clearly understood the political and economic structure.
