Mr. Kneff

To mark the release of a DVD box set in 2021, Steven Soderbergh decided to give some of his earlier films a new lease of life. One of them was Kafka, which “morphed” into Mr. Kneff, a story set in Prague in 1919 about a writer, whose miserable job provided him with literary inspiration. The new cut is twenty minutes shorter and Soderbergh also rearranged the narrative structure and coloured certain scenes to make a clearer distinction between reality and the protagonist’s imagination. The dialogues were replaced by subtitles; the music was also altered, incorporating, among others, the instrumental version of Metallica’s song “Enter Sandman”. Mr. Kneff, arguably a film about Kafka, but now without Kafka, in comparison with the original is thus noticeably estranged and more surreal. (Karlovy Vary International Film Festival)