Die Verwandlung

«What’s happened to me?»

Gregor Samsa, the man who wakes up as a bug one morning, lives in the spiritual compost of his kin. And he grows rampant, silently. Franz Kafka’s DIE VERWANDLUNG shows a family that is unable to embrace its core filth as part of their own existences. So Gregor Samsa chooses the freedom of death to detach himself from the others. Sister, mother, and father choose the freedom of independence and reject the family’s cloying toxicity in order to live. Kafka’s life-reckoning—he must choose between dependency and freedom, care for others and care for the self—does not work out for anyone.

This time director Leonie Böhm looks at the rot and mold, where the bugs live. How do we transform schisms and disgust into a viable future? What connective force harnesses that insect energy in the dark, allowing us to live as bugs among bugs?