Kafka (Season 1)

Kafka (2024) is an Austrian-German biographical miniseries you can watch online on iFILM. Rather than march through a tidy timeline, it studies the Prague writer through the people who knew him: his father, his closest friend, the women he loved, his editor. Each episode picks a different lens, and from those mismatched accounts emerges a man almost no one noticed while he lived.

Franz published little and sold less. By day a clerk at an insurance office, by night the author of stories the world would later call Kafkaesque. The series hangs on three knots: the crushing bond with his domineering father Hermann, the love affairs that never gave him peace, and the friendship with Max Brod, the man who ignored Kafka's dying wish to burn the manuscripts and so kept The Trial and The Castle from vanishing. That one act of disobedience is why we have Kafka at all.

David Schalko directs from a script by novelist Daniel Kehlmann, with Jan Bülow as Franz alongside David Kross and Liv Lisa Fries. The angle is refreshingly unsentimental: not a monument to genius, but a nervous, wry, achingly lonely man. One for viewers who like smart European biopics and Kafka himself. Stream Kafka (2024) online on iFILM.