Agnieszka Holland will arrive in Bulgaria for the premiere of her film Franz in 2025.
In October this year, renowned director Agnieszka Holland, one of the most prominent figures in contemporary European cinema, will be honored with the CineLibri Lifetime Achievement Award and the honorary title Doctor Honoris Causa from the Krastyo Sarafov National Academy for Theatre and Film Arts (NATFA).
Holland is visiting Bulgaria at the invitation of the organizers of the 11th International CineLibri Book-to-Film Festival and the second edition of the BOB (Based-On-Books) International Forum, dedicated to the art of literary adaptation for the big screen. Within the CineLibri program will take place the official Bulgarian premiere of her latest film, the highly anticipated biographical drama Franz. The film is dedicated to writer Franz Kafka, a modernist icon and one of the most significant German-language authors of the 20th century. A major co-production between the Czech Republic, Poland, France, Germany, and Turkey, Franz will have its world premiere at the 50th edition of the prestigious Toronto International Film Festival. It will then be screened in Sofia at the attendance of the director, followed by a discussion with the audience.
This year, Agnieszka Holland is the recipient of the CineLibri Lifetime Achievement Award – an honor that places her alongside previous laureates such as Ian McEwan, Volker Schlöndorff, and Jiří Menzel. The elegant statuette will be officially presented to her during the awards ceremony on October 24th in Hall 1 of the National Palace of Culture (NDK).
The Academic Council of NATFA has officially voted to award the distinguished Polish director the honorary title Doctor Honoris Causa. The formal ceremony will take place on October 27th, 2025, in the Aula of the Academy.
Agnieszka Holland is a Polish director and screenwriter, a leading figure in contemporary arthouse cinema. She is known for her socially engaged filmmaking and her fearless exploration of painful historical subjects. During the Prague Spring, she was arrested for supporting the dissident movement.
Holland has received international acclaim, with awards and nominations from the Academy Awards, Golden Globes, Cannes, Berlin, Venice, and San Sebastián. Her acclaimed works include Provincial Actors (FIPRESCI, Cannes 1978), Fever (Berlin, 1981), Julie Walking Home (Venice, 2002), Angry Harvest (Oscar nomination, 1986), and Copying Beethoven (San Sebastián, 2006). She was nominated for an Oscar for Europa Europa (1990) and for a Golden Globe for In Darkness (2012). Her more recent films include Mr. Jones (2019), about the Holodomor in Ukraine; Charlatan (2020); and Green Border (Venice, 2023) – a critical look at the fate of refugees on the Belarus–Poland border. Spoor, based on the novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, won the Silver Bear for innovative cinema. In 2014, Holland became Chair of the European Film Academy.
Her newest film, Franz, is a kaleidoscopic mosaic tracing the life of Franz Kafka from his birth in 19th-century Prague to his death in Berlin after World War I. The film explores themes that remain highly relevant today, including Kafka’s reflections on totalitarianism, familial oppression, the inability to truly communicate, and a fatalistic, pessimistic view of humanity’s future.
Holland presented the trailer for Franz at the 59th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, emphasizing that the film has a more associative than linear narrative structure. She recalled that Kafka was practically banned in Czechoslovakia for most of the communist era – unsurprising given the “Kafkaesque” reality of the time, marked by alienation, existential anxiety, and absurdity.
The film was co-written by Marek Epstein and Agnieszka Holland. The producer is Mike Downey, and the role of Franz Kafka is played by German actor Idan Weiss.
Explaining her motivation for making the film, Holland says:
“Kafka has been interpreted in so many ways, as is shown in the film, but when you compare what he wrote with what was written about him they are poles apart. So, we didn’t want to reinterpret Kafka; we wanted to make him alive… After the fall of communism in what is now the Czech Republic, in the 21st century, slowly, Kafka became the biggest public tourist attraction and the brand for the [various souvenir] gadgets, frankly. In that context, the goal of Franz is to come closer to an answer to the question of what is the essence of Kafka, and how much that essence has been buried underneath the popular culture.“