Who was Kafka ? (Richard Dindo, 2006) English version

His works are world-renowned, his personality much less so – even though it constantly surfaces between the lines of his novels and diaries. Richard Dindo offers here far more than a simple biography of Franz Kafka (1883-1924). Step by step, from the writer's childhood to his untimely death, the director explores the complexities of his existence, revealing a personality as exceptional as it was tormented. To bring his subject to life, he lends him the voice of Sami Frey (who uses excerpts from Kafka's personal writings) and calls upon actors to portray his loved ones (his friends Max Brod and Gustav Janouch, his fiancées Felice Bauer, Milena Jesenká, and Dora Diamant). Images of Prague, shots of the interiors Kafka inhabited, and Hebrew chants give substance to the words, through which emerges a secretive and desperate personality whose life, marked by an overbearing father and by Judaism, depended entirely on writing. Beyond the narratives recounting the writer's short life—his family relationships, his work at an insurance company, his loves, his illness—the filmmaker delves into his soul. By recreating his ceaseless walks through Prague, he composes a Kafkaesque "psychogeography" in images, whose obsessions and litanies punctuate the film. Even if the mystery remains somewhat unresolved, we gradually come to understand one of the most important figures in 20th-century literature, haunted in a premonitory way by the nightmare of totalitarianism. And we experience the anguish of the man who, convinced that his writings were mere "scribbles," wanted to hide his work from the world and asked his friend Max Brod to burn it. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0776201/ -