Who Was Kafka? on AllMovie

A certified insomniac, the celebrated belletrist Franz Kafka whiled away the hours between dusk and dawn authoring tomes - tomes whose dreamlike, often nightmarish qualities (a human transformed into a giant cockroach, an unwitting fellow trapped in a labyrinthine bureaucratic web) were inextricable from the circumstances in which their progenitor created them. Naturally, these facts continue to spin a web of intrigue and mythos around the original author; per its title, the pseudo-documentary Who Was Kafka? travels beyond these enigmas to revisit Kafka himself. The program uses a Meeting of the Minds-style setup, where actors portray Franz Kafka's closest acquaintances, are posed incisive questions about the author and then answer in the real life figures' own documented words. Each character describes his or her relationship with the writer (and observations of Kafka) in colorful and revealing detail.