Tales of the Night

Three people occupy an abandoned cinema: a young woman, a young man and an old technician. Every night they choose a tale, prepare their costumes and perform it. Six stories are told: a werewolf, a drummer in the Antilles, a chosen one in the land of the Aztecs, a boy in Tibet, a child in Africa and a knight in medieval Europe. The subject is not the tales but the habit the three have of building a world each night. The cinema has closed and nobody comes; they perform for themselves, and the film presents that empty auditorium as a possibility. The form is Michel Ocelot's known silhouette technique. The characters are pure black outline against saturated, detailed backgrounds, and that contrast operates identically in every frame. It was made in three dimensions and the depth is used in layering the silhouettes; the technique here is compositional rather than a display. The source is a short series of tales the director had previously made for television; Ocelot carried the same method into a feature. The film screened at the Berlin festival in 2011. Who it is for: viewers who like silhouette animation and folk tales from around the world. Who it is not for: anyone expecting a connected narrative; the sections are independent and some of them are very short.