Marie-Paule von Roesgen

Director F.W. Murnau makes a Faustian pact with a vampire to get him to star in his 1922 film "Nosferatu."

Heinrich wishes to conquer death through love, and when he meets Henriette, the wife of a business acquaintance, she expresses interest in a suicide pact when she learns she has a terminal illness.

Roger, a Luxembourgish writer, transforms the characters around him into fictional beings: playing with reality and fantasy, he makes his novel "d'Symmetrie vum Päiperlek", a poetic and dreamlike fantasy, when multicolored butterflies come to land on the chessboard of a rather gloomy daily life.

Luxembourg, October 1830. Unrest spreads in the region in the wake of the Belgian Revolution. Fed up with the domination of the Dutch, most of the people want to become Belgian. Those who want an independent Luxembourg are few. Among them a town clerk obstinately refuses to accept the Belgian nationality. Considered as a traitor, he is forced to go into exile. A few years later, in 1839, Luxembourg finally becomes independent.

Daniel is a former police officer turned debt collector. Now in his late fifties, he goes about his "dirty job" without emotion or sympathy. One winter's day, he stops at a roadside parking lot and is approached by Laura, an 18-year-old young woman who asks him to drive her home. He accepts, and on the way, she offers him "her services" in exchange for money. Daniel is furious, and throws her out of his car. But his feelings of remorse and the violence of his reaction lead him to turn around and retrace his steps, only to discover that Laura has disappeared...

A team of several researchers travel to the Swiss Alps to investigate a scientific discovery on human evolution. The trip, however, turns into a deadly fight for survival when the team crash into a gully and find themselves falling prey to someone...or something.

For most people, a wedding signifies a hopeful beginning, but then, Catherine and Christian aren't most people. She is a spoiled rich girl with an insatiable desire for the low and degraded side of life. Christian is without any resources, inner or outer, and caters to Catherine's every whim, even when she sends him out in the middle of their wedding reception to score some heroin for her. Their wedding is the starting point for their relentless downward spiral into the most brutally senseless lives imaginable, in this stylishly filmed exploration of the dark netherworld of the human spirit.

The title of the film, set in Luxembourg in 1942, during the Nazi occupation, amalgamates the words Schacko (helmet) and chapeau claque (opera hat). The village, in which it is set, has not yet been feeling the effects of the war at this point.