John Malkovich is set to be reunited with Austrian film and opera director Michael Sturminger for a big screen adaptation of The Giacomo Variations.

The US actor will reprise his role as an aging Casanova, reliving past exploits in a surreal series of operatic flashbacks.

The “chamber opera play”, conceived by Sturminger and conductor Martin Haselböck, has been performed around the globe starring Malkovich since its premiere in 2011. It was the second collaboration between Sturminger and  Malkovich after working together on The Infernal Comedy, a production about the Austrian serial killer Jack Unterweger.

For full production credits visit

The production by Amour Fou received $265,000 (€200,000) in funding from the Vienna Film Fund last month and joins Vienna/Luxembourg-based company’s eclectic production slate which includes new projects by Jessica Hausner (Amour Fou), Virgil Widrich (The Night of the 1,000 Hours), and Elfi Mikesch (Fieber).

The funding session at the Film Fund, which allocated a total of $2.37m (€1.8m) to nine projects, also awarded support to:

  • Michael Glawogger’s new documentary Untitled, to be produced by Lotus Film with Berlin-based Razor Film;

  • Harald Sicheritz’s adaptation of Kurt Palm’s crime comedy Bad Fucking, starring Michael Ostrowski, Thomas Mraz and Wolfgang Böck;

  • Andreas Prochaska’s Alpine western Das finstere Tal, with Sam Riley, Tobias Moretti and Erwin Steinhauer, produced by Allegro Film with Germany’s X-Filme Creative Pool;

  • Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala’s fiction feature debut, the family horror film Ich seh/Ich seh which will be produced by Ulrich Seidl’s own production company.