The Whore and the Whale (2004) on Netflix

A Spanish writer finds an old coffer with photographs of an Argentine man who fought and died in the Spanish Civil War, and of a woman. Her quest for answers brings Vera to the Argentine Patagonia.

Vera's former publisher, a Spanish journalist and writer brings her a suitcase with old photographs and letters and asks her to travel to Argentina to write a story about the man and the woman in the photos. So she goes from Madrid to Buenos Aires to Patagonia on the trail of a seventy-year-old story involving a love letter, old photographs, a whale, a bordello and Tango. There she learns that she has hereditary breast cancer, and soon after she crosses a line and suddenly she is in hospital, has already been operated upon, and determines that from now on she will do exactly as she likes. She has entered a world governed by her psychological needs, and suddenly 'coincidence' flowers around her.

—Gary Dalkin