Diorama with dual-channel HD video and scenography. Duration - 14:17 min. Created for the exhibition at Kunsthalle Praha, which opened on the 16th April 2026, ‘A Letter to Felice’ is a homage to Franz Kafka. This marks the first time that William Kentridge has explicitly dedicated a work to the Prague writer, whose literature has long informed his artistic practice. The work is composed of lines drawn from around twenty texts - novels, diaries, and letters (among them one addressed to Felice Bauer, Kafka's fiancée) - selected almost at random, then cut up and rearranged to form a loose narrative structure. ‘A Letter to Felice’ unfolds as a drama in six acts, centred around an assassination and Kafka's reflections after being unwittingly caught up in it. The scenes move from morning exercises based on Kafka's own routines to typing and street observations, a ballet between Kafka and Felice, and a silent film featuring performances by Kentridge wearing a Kafka mask. The historical context is suggested through military exercises and images of Prague from the 1910s and 1920s. Infused with the artist's own sense of the absurd, ‘A Letter to Felice’ evokes the early twentieth century as a moment of fear and instability, punctuated by fleeting moments of insouciance. ​ ‘Pepper’s Ghost’ was a Victorian theatrical illusion technique that was popularized by John Henry Pepper in 1862. Objects and performers behind the mirror can be seen (if they are lit), while images or performers in front of the mirror are reflected (if they are lit) into an indeterminate ‘spectral’ space in the audiences’ field of vision. Drawing on this historical device I designed and constructed a miniature environment in which theatre, cinema, and literature converge. This new application of the illusion technique offers a contained, perpetually performing world. Reflected holograms, along with prerecorded moving images, interact with the curated physical scenography placed in the set. These Pepper's Ghost Dioramas have become a vehicle for creating multi-layered, non-linear narratives which upset conventional ways of storytelling.

Laying bare the creative process, SELF-PORTRAIT AS A COFFEE-POT is a dazzling, nine-episode film series by South African artist William Kentridge, renowned for his animated drawings for projection, as well as his sculpture, theatre and opera productions over the last forty years. Now streaming globally: https://mubi.io/self-portrait-as-coffee-pot The nine-episode series, created and directed by William Kentridge, is executive produced by Rachel Chanoff and Noah Bashevkin of THE OFFICE PERFORMING ARTS + FILM, Joslyn Barnes of LOUVERTURE FILMS and the WILLIAM KENTRIDGE STUDIO, and edited by Walter Murch, Janus Fouché and Žana Marović. 30 Days of Great Cinema Free: https://mubi.com/youtube Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://mubi.io/2XVL0VN Follow us on Instagram: http://mubi.tv/299eJ7G Follow us on Twitter: http://mubi.tv/1PcdRyO Follow us on Facebook: http://mubi.tv/29adiHj Follow us on TikTok: https://mubi.io/3w30MSP

Marseille, 1941: a liner sails for Martinique. Fleeing Vichy France, on board are surrealist André Breton, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, Cuban painter Wifredo Lam, Communist novelist Victor Serge and exiled German author Anna Seghers. The Great Yes, The Great No adds its layer of fiction to history, augmenting this very real passenger list with several other famous figures: Martiniquan writers Suzanne and Aimé Césaire, Jeanne and Paulette Nardal, in whose salon in Paris the theorized concept of ‘négritude’ was born, in dialogue between Aimé Césaire, Leopold Senghor (a Senegalese writer) and Léon-Gontran Damas (a Guyanais poet). Also on board are philosopher Frantz Fanon, Joséphine Bonaparte (another Martiniquais), Joséphine Baker, Trotsky and even Stalin. All are united by the symbolic power of the crossing, experienced in turn as uprooting, exile or reinvention - from Africa to the Caribbean, from the Caribbean to Europe, from war-torn Europe to a new elsewhere. It’s no coincidence that Kentridge conceived of the Captain as an incarnation of Charon - the ferryman of the Underworld on the River Styx: this wartime transatlantic voyage takes characters and spectators into another world, governed by a deconstruction of signs and words. In addition to the writings and words of these famous thinkers and artists, which find their way into the text of the play in fragments, the Captain constructs his lines from snippets taken from Bertolt Brecht, Anna Akhmatova, Wislawa Szymborska, Marina Tsvetaeva and others. The Great Yes, The Great No is part play, part oratorio, part chamber opera. William Kentridge’s breathtaking visual inventiveness, particularly linked to the spirit of surrealism, is in dialogue with Nhlanhla Mahlangu’s musical composition, in a dramaturgy combining a ‘Greek choir’, actors and dancers, projections, masks and shadow play. The fertile ground of the Black Paris of the 1940's, the poetics of Martinique, Surrealism and the Négritude movement form the background to the libretto. The Great Yes, The Great No is led by these anti-rational ways of approaching language and image. Finding strange beauty in the unexpected, the uncanny, the disregarded and the unconventional, surrealism has been described as Negritude's creative weapon, and The Great Yes, The Great No captures the poetic and the revolutionary as it gestures towards a more free future possibility.

A film by William Kentridge for Shostakovich Symphony No. 10 "How to make a film to accompany a live orchestral performance of a symphony? There are already 80 musicians in the orchestra. There is the shine of the brass. The excitement of watching the relationship between the conductor and the musicians. Behind this, to put a film. The key task in making the film Oh To Believe in Another World to accompany the Shostakovich symphony no. 10, is to find something that does not turn the symphony into film music - a series of images and narratives that overwhelm the music itself; nor to have something that disappears, that runs simply as series of anodyne backdrops. But the story of Shostakovich and his complicated relationship to the state in the Soviet Union, from its early days just after the 1917 revolution, all the way through to Stalin’s death in 1953, provides the material for thinking visually about the trajectory that Shostakovich had to follow, from the early days of the Soviet Union to the writing of the symphony. This is a retrospective look at the four decades of the 1920s, 30s, 40s, and 50s, from the perspective of 1953 when both Stalin died and the first performance of the symphony was presented. In the 1920s there was the death of Lenin; in the 1930s the suicide of Mayakovsky; in the 1940s, the assassination of Trotsky; in the 1950s the death of Stalin – and here we are, almost 70 years later. The report that remains of these decades is in the music of Shostakovich, the one who against expectation got away, and survived.” WK