synopsis:

franz kafka is a clerk in the labyrinthine bureaucracy of the Workers and Accident Association insurance company in Prague. The vast insurance office he works in does remind of a similar set in Jack Lemmon's office in Billy Wilder's the apartment. He spends his spare time writing stories. He becomes concerned when co-worker Eduard Raban goes missing and later turns up murdered. His attempts to learn what happened lead him to a co-worker Gabriela Rossan who was having an affair with Eduard. Gabriela draws Kafka into the company of a group of revolutionaries, but then she too goes missing. After being attacked by an insane disfigured killer, Kafka decides he must illicitly enter the all-powerful castle that overlooks the town and seek the truth amid the sinister experiments being conducted there.

about this movie:

in this movie, starring Jeremy Irons and Sir Alec Guinness, Soderbergh hits upon a Kafka-esque atmosphere of paranoid uncertainty, of protagonists being trapped in a world that operates on rules beyond their understanding.

It is no secret that the early 20th century writer Franz Kafka frequented anarchist meetings during his youth in Prague. We already knew this through information provided by his friends and biographers. In addition, some scholars, such as Mijal Levi, have looked at Kafka's body of literary work as an interpretation of the anarchist vision. When working on 'Kafka', Steven Soderbergh took into account the components of both Kafka's life and his work. the story unfolds in a foreign context, is partly filmed in black and white, and is quite literary and philosophical.

Soderbergh claims no faithful adherence to historical reality, but the details of the film are remarkably on target: The two German language newspapers that Kafka carries throughout the film were actually circulating in anarchist circles between 1910 and 1912, when Kafka was a diligent militant (although inadvertently a poster in the film declares that we are in 1919). The real Kafka was arrested at least once by the police in 1912 - not for bomb-related events but for collective demonstrations and union organizing campaign activities.in 'kafka' Soderbergh succeeded in his effort to interpret Kafka's political and philosophical dimensions by creating a web of intrigue, corruption, repression and thought control.