JIFF: Kafka's Last Trial

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https://www.jiff.com.au/films/kafkas-last-trial

Date Reviewed: 22/10/2025

Without Max Brod, there would be no Kafka. Without this film, we might never grasp the full absurdity of his afterlife.

I was transported to the Kafka Museum in Prague, with The Metamorphosis coming alive through animation so vivid you can almost hear the cockroach’s juices. And so begins Kafka’s Last Trial, directed by Eliran Peled; a visually arresting documentary that unravels the century-long saga of Franz Kafka’s manuscripts, papers he explicitly asked to be destroyed but weren’t.

Moral, legal, and existential questions unfold following Kafka’s death and Max Brod’s fateful decision to defy his friend’s wishes. Without Brod, there would be no Kafka; the world would never have known his genius.

The journey begins in Prague, where Kafka’s ghost still lingers in cobbled alleyways and smoky cafés. Based on Benjamin Balint’s acclaimed Kafka’s Last Trial: The Case of a Literary Legacy, Peled’s film is meticulously researched, layered with interviews with descendants, librarians, lawyers, scholars, and childhood friends of the Hoffe family.

Human contradictions are stitched together through superb editing and breathtaking graphic visuals. As layered as one of Kafka’s own parables, the film captures Brod’s “benevolent betrayal”; his refusal to burn the manuscripts, instead publishing Kafka’s most personal works. It was an act of love that ensured Kafka’s immortality, but at a cost: a real-life trial over who owns literature itself.

After Brod’s death, his secretary and companion, Ilse Hoffe, inherited the manuscripts. Her daughter Hava later claimed them as her own, until the National Library of Israel intervened, arguing that Kafka’s legacy belonged to the Jewish people. The Hoffes were vilified, portrayed as hoarders of a national treasure — as if trapped in one of Kafka’s own shadowy worlds of accusation and paranoia.

Yet Peled’s film resists easy judgment. Through archival footage, diary excerpts, and rare interviews, Kafka’s Last Trial humanises Hava Hoffe — a woman caught in an absurd system.

Interspersed throughout are moments of brilliance: a cartoon sequence set in a Tel Aviv apartment where a young couple discovers that Max Brod once lived there; walls dissolve into hand-drawn memories of dust, cats, and manuscripts piled like relics of a forgotten world. This “museum narrative” — shifting between animation, documentary realism, and historical re-enactment — is witty, surreal, and poignantly beautiful. One only wishes there were more of it.

Peled populates his film with memorable figures: journalist Meir Ouziel, Haaretz reporter Ofer Aderet who exposed the Hoffe controversy, archivist Stefan Litt of the National Library, and many others who embody the film’s moral tension.

But Kafka’s Last Trial is more than a legal mystery, it’s a meditation on ownership: of culture, of genius, of memory. Who can claim Kafka? A secular man who wrote in German, but i mocked Judaism as “empty of content,” and dreamed of emigrating to “Palestina” before the state of Israel existed?

"The manuscripts are not Max’s, nor Ilse’s, nor Hava’s,” one voice reflects. “They belong to nobody.”

Or perhaps, as Peled suggests, they belong to all of us; to the collective human struggle for meaning in a world ruled by absurdity.

As the trial unfolds, Kafka’s fiction bleeds into reality. Bureaucratic absurdity reigns. The judge demands witnesses long dead. Each frame echoes the same haunting question: what happens when an artist’s dying wish collides with posterity’s hunger for immortality?

In the end, as the camera pans over the fragile manuscripts, one realises that the true trial is not over Kafka’s papers, but over the meaning of ownership itself.

Highlights

• Exceptional archival research and layered storytelling
  

• Breathtaking animated sequences bridging past and present
  

• A nuanced, empathetic portrayal of the Hoffe family
  

• Deep philosophical inquiry into the ownership of culture
  

• A story as morally tangled and tragicomic as any Kafka novel

Who's it for?

• Lovers of literature and art-house documentaries
  

• Kafka enthusiasts and scholars of European modernism
  

• Viewers intrigued by moral paradoxes and legal dilemmas
  

• Anyone drawn to questions of cultural heritage and identity
  

• Fans of animated and experimental storytelling in nonfiction
  

Suggestion:
We’d love to see a full animation of Kafka’s works — not just fragments — as glimpsed so brilliantly in this documentary.

'Kafka's Last Trial is one of 50 Jewish-themed films from around the world, screening as part of the Jewish International Film Festival in Australian cinemas nationally from 19th October through to 21st December.

Reviewed by Mary Sinanidis