VIDEO		Someone is Sleeping in my Pain — An East-West Macbeth    Yemen / USA / Germany 2001, full-length feature film (95 min.), DV Produced from December 2000 through January 2001 in New York City and the Republic of Yemen Produced & Directed by: Dr. Michael Roes Director of Photography: Manfred A. Hagbeck Editor: Ludmilla Korb-Mann Starring: Andreá Smith, Ahmed Hizam al-Dulaee, Abdullah Nasser Muhammed Al-Hamdani, Yahya Hamood Mohsin Al-Dhafeeri, and many others Six years ago (in 1994/95), the Berlin author Dr. Michael Roes lived and worked in Yemen for over one year, undertaking an ethnological field study on the traditional games and dances of the South Arabian tribes, which resulted in his award-winning novel Rub'Al-Khali. Leeres Viertel in 1996. In the winter of 2000, he returned to South Arabia to make the feature film Someone is Sleeping in my Pain about an American film director (played by the Afro-American theater director, actor and dancer Andreá Smith) who comes to the region's mountain ranges to make an Arabic version of Shakespeare's Macbeth with the Yemenite tribal warriors. "Fascinated by the hostility of the landscape and the seriousness of its inhabitants, [the director] wants to use the archaic backdrop to capture the warriors' everyday life as authentically as possible," Roes explains. "Then, for them, honor, hospitality and blood feuds – those medieval concepts which occupied the Scottish king Macbeth – are not obsolete ones, but are values that are still valid and lived out". "The appeal of this Macbeth adaption is in making the difficulties of its realization into the film's subject. The circumstances of the shooting provide the framework for the film in film, the South Arabian Macbeth," he continues. "The boundaries between the documentation of the work and the staged story become increasingly blurred. The action of the feature film is reflected in the way it is produced, in the Macbeth-like ambition of the director. What was thought at the beginning of the film as being a naïve equation of a contemporary traditional culture with a poetic invention, develops into a dramatic debate between reality and projection, reality and the mise-en-scène." VIDEO TRAILER Press reviews: >> review in "THE YEMEN OBSERVER" >> interview with the director German press: >> review in "DIE ZEIT" >> review in the "BERLINER MORGENPOST"