Pitié pour une ombre

A film adaptation of 'Stochhaus ou la maison des cigognes' by Jean Ray, in which some are captivated by the enigma, while others are drawn to the treasures of a mysterious house.

Just before twilight, a small plane lands on the runway of a country airport. One passenger disembarks: Joe, the last survivor of a Jewish family, the Falsches. He has an appointment with them all tonight, forty years after leaving Berlin for New York in 1938. The Falsches are all waiting for him in the arrival lounge: those who perished in the concentration camps; those who left with Joe in 1938; and those who returned to Berlin after the war. Lilli, a young German woman, is there too; she is the daughter of a Nazi official, who was the love of Joe's youth, and who died during the bombing of Berlin. For Joe, it is a night of encounters, of celebrations beyond life and death.

Doctor Hortobagy is a lonely, used old man, haunted by his memories... The German occupation, the Jews, a denunciation... He feels tracked, but is he really? A night where dream and reality, past and present, will merge, events are unfolding quickly.

When seven archaeologists find an ancient Inca temple, they become victims of an ancient curse. Back in Europe, one by one they fall into a deep sleep and only once a day, all at the same time, they wake up for a few minutes and experience hallucinations where the sinister living mummy of Rascar Capac appears.

Jenny, a young doctor who feels guilty after a young woman she refused to see winds up dead a few days later, decides to find out who the girl was, after the police can't identify the young woman.

Ralf Milan, a hitman, arrives in Montpellier to kill an important witness. He checks in a hotel without knowing that his neighbour has become neurotic after his wife left him.

A foundling, raised in the circus, Sam Lion becomes a businessman after a trapeze accident. However, when he reaches fifty and becomes tired of his responsibilities and of his son Jean-Philippe, he decides to disappear at sea. However, he runs into Albert Duvivier, one of his former employees. He comes to realise that he has ignored the important things in his life.

When they realize the times are changing, five crooks decide to switch from bank robberies to personality abductions.

A judge investigating police corruption finds that the deeper he digs, the more roadblocks he finds.

Three attendees at a puppet theater don various roles in order to sing a variety of songs by Jacques Brel, all while hippies and other eccentrics cavort about them.

The 16th short film as part of the Magica series dealing with pre-cinema. Mr Seymour, the hero of the book by London doctor Mr Paris, shows his invention – the thaumatrope – to a little girl and explains how it works. The superimposition of the images is not perfect, so he invents the use of elastic instead of the usual string. Only by recording the two successive images of the thaumatrope on a title bench can they be viewed perfectly. Numerous examples are shown.

Following over two dozen different individuals in the almost wordless atmosphere of a dark night in a Brussels town, acceptance and rejection in the realm of romance is examined.

An elderly man in love claims he will marry his ward tomorrow. A more cunning young lover warns her and, on the very same day, makes her his wife, right under the guardian's nose and in his own house...