| The story of the film begins on one night when Matis Zelk, employee of the Latvian National Archive in Riga, spots a woman on the bridge. After he passed by her failing to prevent her to commit suicide, he is haunted by a sense of failure and guilt that change his life. He can’t forget her. Pushed by deep regret and feverish illusion, he wanders around the city night and day in search for traces of her existence. He is getting increasingly lonely while questing for the details about the fate of the woman and the people who knew her. He is torn apart by pain, guilt, the cruelty of love and sensuality, as well as the quest for forgiveness, liberation and salvation.
About whether we can also be responsible for not acting, Fred Keleman says:
“We are basically accountable for everything that we do; therefore we can be accountable for what we didn’t do in a situation.”
About the idea for the film, he says that it has simply found him:
“Suddenly you get to respond to some external impulses. You get the feeling about some things you have to deal with. I don’t know why it happens; it is a secret for me.
About suicide, the driving force behind the story of the film, Keleman says:
“The fact is that certain people decide to kill themselves when they see this as the last resort for the situation plaguing them. I don’t want to say that from their standpoint death is the only solution for life, but it is what they think to be the only available solution. It seems that there is no other way. Life is like that, we have to make decisions all the time. Suicide is a religious and ethical issue, but the fact is that when someone decides to end his life in that way, it is always the sign of a terrible state of affairs… in the cultural and civilizational sense. It is the sign that something is wrong with the societies we live in.
Fred Kelemen was born in West Berlin in 1964. He has studied painting, music, philosophy, science of religion and drama. He has worked in various theatres as assistant director, prior to beginning to embarking on studies on the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin in 1989. Since then, he has made several films and videos as director and cooperated with several directors. He has directed several plays in German theatres. He is guest lecturer in the Catalonian Centre for Cinematographic Studies in Barcelona, in the School of Visual Arts in Geneva and the Latvian Cultural Academy in Riga. Member of the European Film Academy.
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