Kafka's Last Story

Sagi Bornstein's documentary traces the tortured route of Franz Kafka's private papers, which culminated in a complicated Israeli legal battle. When Kafka died in Prague in 1924, he was a barely-published writer. In his will, Kafka urged his friend and mentor Max Brod to burn his unpublished work, but Brod dismissed Kafka's request as the morose plea of a severely depressed personality. Brod escaped the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia with Kafka's papers and settled in British colonial Palestine (today's Israel). When Brod died, the papers were transferred to his secretary, Esther Hoffe. Hoffe's surviving daughter, Eva, took possession of the papers following her mother's death, but this set off a dispute with the Israeli government over the ownership rights to the Kafka material. Bornstein is clearly unsympathetic to the reclusive Hoffe—the film's press notes describe her as “unstable” and “eccentric” (she lives alone in a Tel Aviv apartment with an unknown quantity of cats), and she is presented in a way that makes her seem mentally incompetent. In an effort to punch up the film's legal-dry subject matter, Bornstein fills the screen with a lot of flashy Hebrew-language text and edits the material with music video-style staccato pacing. A potentially Kafkaesque story that suffers from the distracting filmmaking, this is not a necessary purchase. Aud: C, P. (P. Hall)