Franz and Milena—separated by distance, her husband, and a flood of letters—are a love that fills Kafka’s life with light and hope, while also illuminating the fears and darkness within him. Inspired by Kafka’s Letters to Milena, Kafka in Love explores the multidimensional experience of falling in love.

Falling in love is a profoundly intimate experience that is rarely shared with others, and certain aspects of it remain hidden even between lovers—and from oneself. Franz Kafka’s Letters to Milena Jesenská offer a chance to look into an exceptionally open and honest record of this particularly vulnerable state of mind, and to discover a different side of Kafka, uncommon in his literary works. How much do we truly understand what falling in love is, and what it entails? At first there was some regret about the lost letters from Milena, but I believe this absence makes something clearer: falling in love often means building an idealised image of the other, rather than understanding their real personality and loving them for who they are. The film’s main goal is to portray the continuous emotional shifts of the mind when it moves through strong and complex feelings—swinging from positive to negative, between fantasy and the intrusion of reality. The film explores not only love, but also loneliness and the difficulty of loving and accepting oneself. In this journey, sand animation was crucial to shape love’s ever-changing landscapes: grains of sand become a symbol of the delicacy of emotions and the transient illusions we create when we fall in love.