05/12/2013 - Munich-based production outfit Walker+Worm Film brings Stefan Zweig’s well-known novel back to the screen

Producer Tobias Walker, writer/director Cüneyt Kaya and producer Philipp Worm

The Munich based production outfit Walker+Worm Film is going to adapt the best-selling novel Chess Story in which the Austrian author Stefan Zweig describes the decline of the bourgeoisie in Europe during the National Socialism. A chess champion competes with a mysterious man on a transoceanic passenger ship and finds out eventually why his opponent is such a great chess player. The story will be brought to the big screen by the German-Turkish writer/director Cüneyt Kaya who gave his feature film debut with the dark Muslim comedy Ummah - Unter Freunden [+see also:
trailer
film profile].

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German producers Tobias Walker and Philipp Worm started out with the acclaimed prison drama Picco [+see also:
film review
interview: Philip Koch
film profile] by Philip Koch which was co-produced by the Munich film school. The terrible tragedy was presented in the Directors’ Fortnight at the International Cannes Film Festival in 2010 where it competed for the Camera d‘Or. The next feature Das Ende der Kindheit by writer/ director Philip Koch is already in development.

Further films of the upcoming company include Finsterworld [+see also:
trailer
film profile] by Frauke Finsterwalder which was shown in competition at the Montreal Word Film Festival and the Zurich Film Festival 2013 where it won a Golden Eye for the best German-speaking feature film.

Stefan Zweig‘s Chess Story was already made into a film by Georg Oswald in 1960 with movie stars such as Curd Jürgens and Mario Adorf. The remake of the Chess Story isdeveloped by Cüneyt Kaya who co-writes the script with Eldar Grigorian. The dark drama will be shot at the beginning of 2015 on several locations in Munich and Vienna.