The process

"Someone must have slandered Josef K., because without him having done anything wrong, he was arrested one morning." Franz Kafka's THE TRIAL begins with this sentence. There is never a concrete accusation - only the confrontation with a bureaucratic system that K. does not understand: endless labyrinthine office corridors, non-transparent legal structures, nightmarish court proceedings and the grueling wait for an indictment and a verdict. Kafka's protagonist tries in vain to find his way through a faceless and sinister administrative and judicial apparatus whose rules are constantly being changed. This novel of the century was published against the author's express wishes just one year after Kafka's death 100 years ago. Since then, the work of Kafka, who had a doctorate in law, has been adapted for film and stage, as musical theater, comics and radio plays and interpreted in a wide variety of ways: as an autobiographical treatment of an acute relationship crisis, as a psychoanalytical study of guilt and atonement, as a clairvoyant prediction of the exercise of power in the totalitarian systems of the 20th century, as a satire on bureaucracy ... The Iranian director Amir Reza Koohestani is familiar with both the unpredictable arbitrariness of an authoritarian regime and the difficult-to-fathom regulations of German border authorities. His adaptation of Kafka's novel of the century, created especially for Theater Freiburg in collaboration with the author Keyvan Sarreshteh, will highlight the Kafkaesque threats and harassment to which Josef K. is exposed and the existential fears they cause in a very concrete way.