Project Hail Mary and Anatomy of a Fall star Sandra Hüller is teaming up with German director Maria Schrader (I’m Your Man, She Said) on the new German drama Arbeit und Struktur (Work and Structure).
The film is an adaptation of the acclaimed autobiographical memoir by German writer and artist Wolfgang Herrndorf, who began documenting his life after being diagnosed with a terminal brain tumour in 2010. The memoir, published posthumously in 2013, became a literary phenomenon in Germany. The book is a detailed, and often very funny, account of his final years, filled with hope and despair, panic and joy and serenity.
Hüller will play Herrendorf in the film, her latest gender-swapped performance after her turn in Markus Schleinzer’s Rose, a role that won her the best acting honor in Berlin this year.
“Ever since my first encounter with Wolfgang Herrndorf’s work, I have been unable to let go of his writing,” Hüller said in a statement. “His texts are at once surprising, unsettling, and comforting. To encounter him as a person through this film: at a moment when his life changed abruptly, seemed on the verge of falling apart, and when he was simultaneously discovering his voice as a writer before it was tragically silenced, is both a great honour and a profound challenge for me.”
Schrader, who together with Jan Schomburg is adapting Herrndorf’s book for the screen, called the memoir “a solitary and intimate record of what it means to be alive. A man fights with words against his disappearance and, in the face of death, becomes more alive than ever before.”
Komplizen Film will produce Arbeit und Struktur with France’s Haut et Court, their partner on Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann and Valeska Grisebach’s recent Cannes winner The Dreamed Adventure, alongside Studiocanal and German public broadcaster ZDF.
Principal photography is set to begin in early 2027. Studiocanal is handling world sales on the project and will release the film in Germany, France and Italy in 2028.
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