Synopsis

In a quiet cemetery in present day Paris the ghost of French composer and organist Jehan Alain (historic figure) who died in combat during WWII is woken up. He ventures into the cemetery to find his loved ones. 

Jehan wakes up the ghost of his younger sister and fellow organist Marie-Claire Alain (70s) from her nearby grave. Always driven by music, Jehan wants desperately to revisit the pipe organ built by their father and on which he and Marie-Claire learned to play. Devoted Marie-Claire agrees with his plan. 

The bus is running slowly because of strikes, but clever Marie-Claire suggests that they simply “poof” to their next location, a much faster way for ghosts to get to Switzerland where the organ is located. 

Marie-Claire materializes in an overgrown field bordering a highway. She appears in the form of how she was late in life, a woman in her 70s. She realizes that she is not in Switzerland and that her brother Jehan is missing. She walks through the surrounding wilderness calling for him until she hears a strange groaning sound and finds Jehan nestled beside a lake, his body fallen to pieces in the journey, a jumble of bones and his WWII uniform, but he is still able to speak.

 Based on the sounds of nature Jehan identifies that they are in Saumur, France where he was killed in 1940. Marie-Claire asks him to tell the story of his death, then she carries Jehan through the landscape where his story takes place as he recounts how German soldiers found him while he was surveying the land for the French Army. They cornered him, but he shot sixteen of them before they killed him. At the end of the story, Jean dies and Marie-Claire places him at the foot of the same tree where he originally died. 

The story shifts to Marie-Claire’s experience as she leaves the battlefield while recounting her own experience of when she heard about Jehan’s death as girl in Paris. She recognizes that Jehan’s death in the war altered the course of her life by giving her the drive to become a great organist herself. She “poofs” into thin air.

 Marie-Claire reappears on a hilltop overlooking a Swiss village. She walks towards the church where the organ is only to find it locked. She retrieves the key from a nun, also a ghost, and ascends the stairway to find the beautiful organ glowing in the church attic. She sits down at it and in an emotional scene led by sound design she plays until the crescendo of emotion reaches a peak and she stops, her spirit floating away. 

A final, brief scene depicts the passing on of music through time when a student and teacher enter the organ room for a music lesson. The student describes her trouble with learning Litanies by Jehan Alain. The teacher pulls out a tablet with an archival video of the actual Marie-Claire Alain playing the composition Litanies by Jehan Alain.