Der Sandmann

Together with the Hungarian author Zsombor Aurél Biró, András Dömötör transposes *The Sandman* into the present day.

As a child, Nathanael is terrified of the Sandman, who is said to steal the eyes of children who refuse to go to sleep. When he is forced to witness his father’s death during mysterious experiments with the sinister lawyer Coppelius, he is certain:

‘It was the Sandman.’ The terrifying image of this man haunts him throughout the rest of his life and gradually merges with reality. His fiancée Clara is convinced that Nathanael can actively fight his demons:

‘As long as you believe in him, he exists and has an effect; your belief alone is his power.’ Nathanael, on the other hand, regards this as an illusion and believes ‘that every human being, whilst imagining themselves to be free, merely serves as a pawn in the cruel game of dark forces’. Only the taciturn and strangely expressionless Olimpia still seems to understand him.

In his adaptation of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s masterpiece of Dark Romanticism, director András Dömötör casts a profoundly satirical gaze upon contemporary distortions of reality, male-dominated cliques and the dark sides of the human psyche.