Karlovy Vary IFF will hold a special retrospective titled “The Wish To Be a Red Indian: Kafka and Cinema”. This showcase will offer cinematic reflections on the work of one of the most influential figures of 20th-century literature. Works from filmmakers such as Orson Welles, Martin Scorsese, Ousmane Sembene, Jan N?mec, and Steven Soderbergh will be included.
The special program’s title refers to one of Kafka’s most enigmatic short stories which, just like cinema, contains strong elements of motion and transformation. “For decades, Kafka’s oeuvre has functioned as a continuing provocation to filmmakers,“ say KVIFF´s artistic director Karel Och and the festival´s consultant Lorenzo Esposito, co-curators of the program. “It is as if he were slyly challenging them to attempt to capture as authentically and intensely as possible the elusive nature of his formulations, of his narratives, of the realities he has crafted and the feelings of apprehension he elicits, yet also of the comic situations he has created,“ continue Och and Esposito.
This June marks a hundred years since Kafka passed away at a sanatorium in the Austrian town of Kierling. In his obituary, written by Milena Jesenská, included this assessment: “Kafka wrote books full of dry scorn and the sensitive perspective of a man who saw the world so clearly that he couldn’t bear it, a man who was bound to die since he refused to make concessions or take refuge, as others do, in various fallacies of reason, or the unconscious – even the more noble ones.”
List of films (work in progress):
The Trial
(dir. Orson Welles, France/Italy/West Germany 1962, 116 min.)
Joseph Kilian
(Postava k podpírání, dir. Pavel Jurá?ek, Czechoslovakia 1963, 38 min.)
The Money Order
(Mandabi, dir. Ousmane Sembene, Senegal/France 1968, 105 min.)
The Castle
(Das Schloß, dir. Rudolf Noelte, West Germany 1968, 88 min.)
The Audience
(L’Udienza, dir. Marco Ferreri, Italy/France 1971, 112 min.)
Metamorphosis
(Die Verwandlung, dir. Jan N?mec, West Germany 1975, 55 min.)
The Tenant
(Le Locataire, dir. Roman Polanski, France 1976, 126 min.)
After Hours
(dir. Martin Scorsese, USA 1985, 97 min.)
Fellini’s Intervista
(Intervista, dir. Federico Fellini, Italy 1987, 105 min.)
Tetsuo
(dir. Shin’ya Tsukamoto, Japan 1989, 67 min.)
Kafka
(dir. Steven Soderbergh, USA/France 1991, 98 min.)
Kafka
(dir. Zbigniew Rybczy?ski, France 1992, 52 min.)
Amerika
(dir. Vladimir Michálek, Czech Republic 1994, 90 min.)
Franz Kafka’s a Country Doctor
(Kafka Inaka Isha, dir. Koji Yamamura, Japan 2007, 21 min.)
Artist of Fasting
(Danjiki geinin, dir. Masao Adachi, Japonsko 2016, 104 min.)
Mr. Kneff
(dir. Steven Soderbergh, USA 2021, 78 min.)
The Tomb of Kafka
(Le Tombeau de Kafka, dir. Jean-Claude Rousseau, France 2022, 14 min.)
Karlovy Vary IFF takes place June 28 – July 6
