Agnieszka Holland has a long-running relationship with Franz Kafka .

The acclaimed Polish director first read the prolific writer as a teenager, she revealed at a THR Frontrunners panel about her Toronto-premiering biopic, Franz . Before crafting this beautifully fragmented portrait of the elusive Czech novelist, however, she had dabbled in bringing Kafka to the screen: a Polish TV adaptation of The Trial , made with her then-husband, Laco Adamik, in the ’80s.

Yet it was only when the filmmaker returned to Kafka’s world for Franz that an entirely new depiction of him formed. “When I started to go to Prague and shoot the film there, it became like my second [home] again, and I met that new presence of Franz Kafka in Prague,” Holland, who studied at the Film and TV School of

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