Kafka for Kids / לקטנים קפקא

Credits

cast

Roee Rosen

Director
01/01/1963

Biography

Roee Rosen (b. 1963) is an Israeli-American artist, filmmaker and writer. He is known for his multilayered and provocative work which often challenges the divides between history and the present, documentary and fiction, politics and erotics. Rosen dedicated years to his fictive feminine persona, the Jewish-Belgian Surrealist painter and pornographer Justine Frank, a project that entailed fabricating her entire oeuvre as well as a book and a short film, Two Women and a Man (2005). In 2010 Rosen created two films. Hilarious and Out, in which a BDSM session becomes a political exorcism. Out premiered at the Venice film festival, where it won the Orizzonti award for best medium-length film. The film went on the win numerous awards, including a nomination for the European Academy award. Rosen’s film, The Dust Channel was coproduced by Documenta 14, where it was exhibited along with two historical text and image installations: The Blind Merchant and Live and Die as Eva Braun. Several retrospectives of Rosen's cinema were held, among them at the Oberhausen film festival (2012), La Roche sur Yon festival (2013), and FICUNAM festival, Mexico City (2018). In 2018 an expansive one person exhibition was held at Centre Pompidou, Paris, entitled Histoires dans le pénombre. The exhibition also included a full film survey. Several one person exhibition of Rosen were held in 2019, among them in the Arts Project Centre, Dublin, and Charlottenborg Kunsthal, Copenhagen. Rosen's two latest books are Live and Die as Eva Braun and Other Intimate Stories (2017), and Desire and Dust (2019), both published by Sternberg Press. He currently works on a book on illness in the guise of coloring pages entitled Lucy is Sick, a part of which was published by Steirischer Herbst (2020). Rosen's latest film is a musical comedy combining fiction, animation and documentary element, entitled Kafka for Kids (2022). It premiered at the Rotterdam Film Festival as part of the tiger competition. His 2022 solo exhibitions include the expansive Kafka for Kids and Other Troubling Tales the Kunstmuseum Luzern. Rosen is a professor at Ha'Midrasha Faculty of Arts, Beit Berl College, in Israel.

Directors Statement

While I always perceived Franz Kafka as one of the greatest literary influence on my work, I felt that attempts to transpose his writings to cinema are doomed to fail. Thus Kafka for Kids is, both conceptually and emotionally, a dichotomous experience, a parodic desecration of the venerated author, that also conveys a passionate engagement; a film that literally infantilizes Kafka, but at the same time seriously pursues concrete narrative, emotive and intellectual layers of his tale. Two or three aspects are particularly highlighted here. First, the surprising ways that indeed tie some of Kafka's works to fairy tells and other children-oriented genres. Second, while Kafka's works are habitually understood as nightmarish, his is also a world of laughter, playfulness and even exhilaration. The film resides in a trajectory between, on the one hand, legal thinking and tropes that are so central in Kafka and, on the other hand, notions and experiences of childhood. This is reflected in lyrics of a song that addresses Gregor's little sister, Grete, but equally pertains to the political and legal reality that the film explores later on: What is a child? What is a child? It's really hard to tell, A child is ever growing, but only for a spell. Till when a child? Till when a child? Seven? Twelve? Fourteen? When will it flip from plump and pink to wrinkled aubergine?