Kafka for Kids and The Dust Channel

Kafka for Kids

Kafka for Kids (111 min.) takes the shape of a musical storytelling, set to be the pilot episode for a television series that aims to make Kafka’s tales palpable for toddlers. The film premiered for the jury of the IFFR 2022 Tiger Competition, after which it was on view for the public in 1646’s cinema. Through this feature-length film, which retells Kafka’s classic story The Metamorphosis, Rosen raises complex topics under the guise of a kids TV-show. An unnamed grandparent figure reads the story to a child in the magical story-house, surrounded by characters like Ms. Lamp, Mr. Table and The Bearer of Bad News. These friends narrate the tale and perform the film’s songs, while accompanied by a toy orchestra. Telling this story to a child is juxtaposed with reflections on how central law was in Kafka’s literature and life. Thus certain questions arise on both an emotional and imaginary level, as well as on a legal and political one. What is a child? Until when does a child remain a child? The film itself goes through its own metamorphosis which leads to an examination of the legal intricacies through which the military law in the occupied territories defines childhood. But even these harsh documentary materials are mixed with the personal and the erotic.

The Dust Channel (23 min.) was made for the occasion of the latest Documenta (no. 14) in 2017. The film takes the form of an operetta with a libretto in Russian, telling the story of a Dyson DC07 vacuum cleaner in the context of an Israeli home. A deep fear of dirt and dust pervades the bourgeois household, resulting in an extreme obsession with cleaning apparatuses: we see a hand intimately caressing the yellow vacuum’s plastic skin. Meanwhile, dust is conflated with sand, and the film glides to a detention center for African refugee seekers located in the Negev desert. The film exposes the multilayered narrative of individual and communal socio-political phobias within Israeli society, along with their connection to leisure and pleasure, abundance and perversions.