Emmanuel Carrère, one of France's most acclaimed writers, traveled to the town of Kotelnich, 500 miles east of Moscow, where he met a married couple, Ania and Sacha, in a local bar. It turned out that Sacha was the local head of the FSB (formerly the KGB). Carrère, intrigued, filmed 100 hours of footage of them. Unsure about what to do with his trove of material, Carrère made an attempt to edit it, but within a month received a call from Sacha-Ania and their eight-month-old child had been brutally murdered. Returning once again to Kotelnich, Carrère brings the earlier footage of Ania and shares it with her mourning family. There are unbearably naked moments when the camera lingers on Ania's bereaved mother as she insists that the cameras be turned off. In a version of Rashomon, every person who loved Ania imagines what he or she thinks might have happened: Sacha views the killing as an assassination, linked to his association with the FSB; a friend thinks it was an escapee from the local psychiatric hospital; Ania's mother even suspects Sacha. This film gives new meaning to cinema verité-the footage is at once dizzying and ghostly, a Dostoyevskian descent, but a fascinating one.