The “Kafka Zone” was created on the occasion of the “Investigations of a Dog” exhibition, presented at the DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art. It includes works from the FACE* collections and borrows its name from the Czech writer's short story of the same name (“Investigations of a Dog”, 1922).

The protagonist of the short story is a dog, which, as the curator of the exhibition, Nadia Argyropoulou, says “questions the limits of its existence or, rather, its emotional identification with the community it belongs to. The selection process of the presented works was based not only on this particularly story, but also on recurrent themes and expressive tactics that characterize the entirety of the Kafka-esque narrative.”

The retrospective of the festival, from its standpoint, resumes the ideas running through the exhibition and presents some exquisite Kafka-esque films: adaptations of his famous works, literary fragments salvaged on film without stating their origin, short films that process the dream provocation (a main theme for Kafka), weird animation, as well as “Mr Klein” by Joseph Losey, a film emerging from inside Kafka's heart, even though this goes unmentioned.

Besides, Kafka is a particularly filmic and filmable writer, as the French philosopher Félix Guattari finds, discovering in Kafka's work the potential of a (collective) cinematic film, shot not for Kafka but (hypothetically) by Kafka himself, something that never materialized, however.

Thus, “Kafka's zone” is nothing more than a specific process of perceiving and thinking, something that the films of this retrospective only hope to depict and set in motion.

Orestis Andreadakis

* The members of FACE (Foundation of Arts for Contemporary Europe) are:

DESTE foundation (Athens)

Ellipse Foundation, Cascais Fondazione

Sandretto Re Rebaundengo, Turin

La Maison Rouge – Fondation Antoine de Galbert, Paris

Magasin 3 Stockholm Kosthall, Stockholm

Kafka - Animated Shorts

THE COUNTRY DOCTOR Drawing her inspiration from the short story of the same name, Lillqvist sets her story in the war-torn Sarajevo and relies on stories from fugitives, to win the Silver ...

Kafka Zone - Shorts

TELEPHONE 1960. A man is alone in an office. In the room there's a telephone, the only means of contact with the rest of the world. He suddenly receives a call and faces the creepiest ...

The Trial

Josef K. will wake up one morning to find the police in his room. They will announce that his trial is about to begin, but no one will say what he'll be tried for. While he attempts to find ...

Class Relations

A young bourgeois is forced to leave his country after a terrible scandal. He eventually accepts the offer from an uncle to emigrate to America, where he takes up various jobs to support himself ...

Metamorphosis: Beyond the Screen Door

Tom Gregor has always been a good son and brother. Suddenly, a mysterious illness keeps him from going to work and support his family. His parents are unable to find work and Tom is pained to ...

Mr. Klein

It's 1942, World War II is raging and the Nazis have occupied France. Robert Klein is an art dealer who's becoming rich by buying the possessions of the persecuted Jewish people for ...