Spanish director Víctor Diago’s docufiction film,Downriver A Tiger is a mercurial foray into filmmaking. It’s one prone to draw its audience into its characters world, seducing us with its themes and ideas one moment, and then the next, leave us feeling lost in the ennui of detachment.

The film follows Júlia Diago, a Spanish woman who fled her native Barcelona some years ago, and has sought sanctuary in Glasgow’s cold and dreary climate. This journey appears to have led her to another place she should like to escape. By day she’s a struggling photographer, and by night, she works in a restaurant. Júlia is a walking cliché – the tormented artist that supports themselves working unfulfilling jobs while persevering with their craft. She habitually photographs Glaswegian locals, and one day while taking a photograph, she struggles to see with her right eye. Forced to wear a patch, she’s reluctant to go to the hospital, despite pleas from her father over the phone. She hopes it will only be a temporary vision loss like last time. In the meantime, she strikes up a friendship with Shubham Santosh Kirve, himself a newcomer to Glasgow.

Diago’s first feature is a playful exploration of cinematic boundaries. It offers the audience some interesting loose threads to pull at.

The wandering photographer imbues Downriver a Tiger with an Antonioni-esque spirit: characters wandering, looking and searching. Diago, however, doesn’t replicate or pay homage to the Italian master. Instead, he creates something that distances itself from Antonioni, merely teasing the connection for us as we search for a way to understand his film. And whether that will ever be possible is uncertain, because Downriver A Tiger might be Diago dreaming about what cinema can be. And like awaking from a dream, the seemingly concrete logic becomes dust. Out of the rubble, however, we might begin to rebuild fragments of the dream, but much of it will feel lost to time and space.

This might be the objective of this type of experimental cinema. The director impresses upon us mere glimpses or impressions, complementing the tonal fractures of the film created by merging fiction and documentary, with possible shades of performance art. It merges oral and visual storytelling traditions. The film’s title comes from a story Shubham shares in the opening scene. Diago explores the way we connect with one another and our world through words and images, for which sight is essential.

Downriver A Tiger is a meditative film that captures a snapshot of the loneliness of the human experience and even a hidden desire to self-destruct or self-harm through fear or indifference. There’s something deep within Júlia’s soul that’s never fully voiced, leaving the audience to draw their own conclusions. It’s unsurprising if there’s a hint of existentialist crisis in its fabric. And the film is a reflection on how life, our choices, the places we choose to live and relationships we build are not beyond becoming types of prisons that ensnare us. As for the migrant journey, Downriver A Tiger expresses something so basic: the need for connection and belonging.

Unfortunately, Diago is partly successful in bringing together the documentary and fictional strands. This beleaguers the film with an inherent tension that ultimately leaves audiences feeling lost in the ennui of its detachment. It is, however, a film that one struggles to forget, in part because of Júlia’s haunting presence.

Downriver A Tiger showed at the 25th REC Tarragona International Film Festival.