Rosen’s engagement with a canonic work such as Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, then, comes hardly as a surprise. A masterpiece that tells the story of a person morphing into an insect, it could have come directly from Rosen’s creative mind. By presenting the work as a piece for children, it falls in line with his other “children’s books,” as well as continuing his defiance of child/adult and male/female divides. Like the transformative qualities of the story it references, Kafka for Kids itself morphs from one thing into another. It is the translation of a book into an opera script and the transformation of a story for adults into a story for kids. As is to be expected, far from being adapted appropriately for a young audience, Kafka’s story is literally dumped on a shocked child. The legal monologue towards the end of the film shows that the interest of the work is not in making Kafka’s Metamorphosis palatable for children but rather to show how the “blind” Israeli justice system in the Occupied Territories creates truly Kafkaesque situations for detained children.

Sergio Edelsztein: from the catalogue Roee Rosen; Kafka for Kids, Kunstmuseum Luzern and Sternberg Press, 2022