Fallen

This atmospheric, suspenseful New Horizons film is a visual masterpiece. An unkempt, Slavic-looking archivist in a worn-out coat comes across a woman on a bridge one summer's night. She is about to jump—no doubt—but he just walks on by. Then he hears a splash. Her body is not found—it must have been a beautiful suicide. He returns to the bridge in daylight and reflects on what happened. Her goes to a nearby pub, where he claims to have been the woman's lover. He obtains the purse that she had left behind there, which contains a few important trinkets, and some unfinished letters that she had thrown in the garbage. They were written while she was sitting at the table and—just as he was at that very moment—drinking a Moskievskya vodka and quietly crying. He decides to follow her tracks. Will he fall in love with her? Will he find some lost meaning? The woman’s life is archived in black-and-white, expressionistically lit scenes in a Latvian city that has been seemingly buried alive and then exhumed from the grave, from the ashes and black earth. And all of this in search of forgiveness.