“KAFKA” 1991 | 1h31’ [US\FR] | I THINK, I WRITE IV Cinema Screnings
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## CicloPENSO LOGO ESCREVO IV
["I THINK, THEREFORE I WRITE IV" Cinema Screenings]
“KAFKA” 1991 | M/12 | 1h31’ [US\FR]
De Steven Soderbergh
Sábado Dia 16/05 às 19h30 [Saturday 05/16 at 7:30pm]
Inspirado no universo literário de Franz Kafka, o filme segue um funcionário de seguros em Praga que se envolve numa conspiração enigmática após a morte de um colega. Realidade e pesadelo confundem-se num mundo burocrático e opressivo.
Inspired by Franz Kafka’s literary universe, the film follows an insurance clerk in Prague who becomes entangled in a mysterious conspiracy after a colleague’s death. Reality and nightmare blur in a bureaucratic and oppressive world.
Spoken in English | Subtitled in Portuguese
Mais info:
More info:
https://prosacultural.org/cinema/pensologoescrevo5
PENSO LOGO ESCREVO (I THINK, THEREFORE I WRITE) is the name of the Creative Writing Workshop proposed by PROSA as a space for inner listening and the creation of fiction, starting from a focus on narratology and the representation of reality. It is an invitation to practice a form of writing that puts us in touch with the ‘self’ — that being who sometimes reveals itself within us, sometimes in the other — building language as one would build a place. Writing is a gesture of search, a quest for being. A liberated act that, beyond enhancing communication skills, stands as a tool for care, resistance, and self-reinvention. In a world increasingly demanding of creativity, writing also becomes a means of survival — emotional, symbolic, and at times, physical.
It is within this horizon that Kafka (1991), by Steven Soderbergh, finds its place. The film imagines the life of the writer Franz Kafka in Prague as though he himself were trapped inside one of his own novels. A humble insurance clerk by day and a writer by night, Kafka moves through a city of shadowy corridors, opaque bureaucracies and secret societies that seem to emerge directly from the pages of The Trial or The Castle. Reality and fiction slowly begin to blur until the external world acquires the unsettling logic of the stories he writes.
The film explores precisely this vertigo: writing as the ability to create worlds that gradually begin to consume us. For Kafka, writing is not a pastime or a literary exercise; it is an absolute immersion in imagination. His texts construct invisible systems of power, faceless tribunals and administrative labyrinths in which the individual becomes lost. Yet in doing so they reveal something essential about modern experience: the feeling that we inhabit structures we cannot fully understand. Fiction thus becomes a way of uncovering the real.
Soderbergh renders this idea almost literally on screen. Much of the film unfolds in stark black and white, evoking European expressionism and the mental atmosphere of Kafka’s narratives. When the story moves into territory closer to conspiracy and the fantastic, colour suddenly appears. It is as if imagination itself were opening a fissure in the fabric of reality. The writer who seeks to understand his time discovers that the only way to do so is by passing through the narrative nightmares he himself has created.
In this sense, “KAFKA” is not merely a film about an author; it is a film about the risk of writing. To create stories is to invent possible realities — and to accept that, in the process, we begin to live within them. Many writers recognise this paradoxical state: characters who continue to exist long after the notebook is closed, worlds that insist on reshaping our perception of everyday life. Writing becomes a kind of existential laboratory.
All Cinema PROSA films will be shown on an illuminated pixel (65’’ QLED screen) in a room with a maximum capacity of 24 spectators.
Come and have a glass of wine or a non-alcoholic drink in the cinema room with us!