Downriver - memory exile and crime in the rainy city of Glasgow

A story of migration, bridges, portraits and the rubble of modernity and progress. The filmmaker converts Glasgow into a living archive, where memory, forgetfulness and past crimes mix under a persistent rain. For a mediterranean person, Glasgow holds a magic in the midst of a harsh greyness.

 The filmmaker’s previous work was in TV and short films drawing on his fascination with archives, as the dialogue between present and past.

And, he says: “all my projects come from a very free approach, without a closed script or storyboards. We like to improvise with whatever comes naturally in the environment”.

After a broken relationship in Barcelona, he came to visit his sister in Glasgow and was soon attracted to the energy of the place and its people.

His sister spent lots of time photographing people, always from a bridge which seemed to symbolise separation and temporariness, and for Victor it connected with his interest in archives, as flowing galleries of portraits.

And a constant awareness of the accelerating flow of time where the world has changed completely in a single generation, and the filmmaker is inspired by Walter Benjamin’s vision of the rubble of progress.

The two main characters as well as Victor himself, are also migrants, seeking a better if precarious life, with the unavoidable issues of visas and money to contend with.

I spoke to Victor for The Prisma, after his film Downriver a Tiger was shown at the Indielisboa film festival in Lisbon

 Glasgow made you want to stay

Seeing that grey city filled with rain, with strange people in the streets, even if they are so nice, I couldn’t understand why my sister lives there: what's the magic of it?

And Glasgow is a very interesting city, the post-industrial environment, the decay. The shipbuilding industry, of course, is very present in the film. I have an obsession with ports and ships.

Walter Benjamin talked beautifully about prehistory, and for us, living in the 21st century, the beginning of the 20th century, is prehistory, so when I see those rusting factories, the wrecked ships, it makes me feel closer to what's been lost, and I wanted to make something from that feeling. It seems as if you look at those empty spaces and they look back at you.

 Images have been so overused that there's a point where they mean nothing. The Mona Lisa tells me nothing now. We need to re-symbolise stuff and find new ruins to add significance to from new viewpoints. And that's also what interests me about archive. What are today’s ruins? Probably an empty box of cookies from 1987, ruins now are plastic and metal and ruins of products that everyone had the exact same copy of, but they speak to us.

 The world was easier to understand, it's all digital now, you can't repair anything yourself.

Definitely, the world is more ghostly now, it evaporates more easily, you don't know where to stand. Things were more physical even one generation ago. Even people in their twenties can feel nostalgia now.

There's a feeling in me of the fear of being forgotten, things that will be lost, and the fear of time, eating us, like a beast. Everything's moves so fast, and it goes out of fashion.

I think that was the feeling surrounding the film, that scary sense of things being forgotten, which is also, like a fear of death.

 Joyce was an important character in the film, and her unpretentious life in Glasgow. Did you go looking for someone like her?

One of the things that I always like to do before shooting, is I go walking for an hour or so. And one day I heard these people doing something in the water of a canal, and I saw the magnet fishers. I called Dani, my cameraman, and said “let's forget about what we were shooting today, bring the camera here”. Joyce was easy to approach, I saw that she had something, and she's very funny. But in Glasgow, people are open to strangers. It's always surprising, in this hard environment, “how are people so likeable?” She seemed to embody many of the things that I found interesting about Glasgow. That's her actual house, you see in the film, filled with boxes. This sort of decay, but at the same time, this happiness that holds it up, life is horrible, but, you know, you can get a laugh. The crack where the light gets in.

 At some point in the film, there was a huge variety of street scenes, present day and archive material. What was the role of that?

 The character of Julia seems to be so separated in the first part of the film to her environment, she takes pictures of the bridges, but we wanted to create this space where, all of a sudden, the city starts to be more monstrous, more and more people appear They are like faces that we've seen on the bridge, but there’s a different vibe. You could read it as a sort of a moving archive.

 Like a gallery where the pictures move instead of the visitors?

That's an interesting point, I like that. I find pleasure in looking at life, and sometimes I want films to be the same way. I really despise this idea of contemporary narrative where we have to make films that go from point A to point B and everything has to make sense.

I enjoy when a film is completely contemplative and I don’t know what it means, but I'm sure someone will see a face there that will make them think of someone, or maybe they'll think, this guy is too full of himself and I don't want to watch this film anymore, I don't care.

 A lot of what the magnet fishers are dragging up in the river was evidence of crime, did that figure as part of your view of Glasgow?

Definitely, that's the history of Glasgow, it has been a very troubled place, especially in the ‘80s, and when the heroin came. It shaped the city, it shaped the faces of the people, but crime is at the base of every civilisation. It's harder to see crime in Benidorm or the Algarve, but crime is there. Raymond Carver said that he likes his short stories to have a low sensation of menace, of something you don’t know what, that is trying to do something to you. In the film it appears in what’s emerging from the river.

 Blindness, why was that such a big thing in the film?

Julia called me one day and said she couldn’t see very well. We made the film as if it's done on purpose, you don't know if it's real, and I don't think it's because of her multiple sclerosis but we thought we’d put it in the film. It’s a bit of a cliché, losing sight means forgetting what you see, your personal archive. For every visual artist, blindness is probably one of the biggest fears.

 Julia’s husband, Shubham says: “we've changed sides, we're both trying to start a new life, to separate ourselves from the past”.

Definitely but that's the tale of every, of every immigrant, especially people who migrate needing work. No-one leaves home because they're so happy there, everyone's trying to escape for some reason. I would say that every human connection is fuelled by that. We always try to look for companions as if we were running away from something, and we think that the other is going to save us, or we’re going to find that thing we keep looking for, even if it's like chasing a desire, desiring itself.

The sentimental experience, do you ever want to go back, what's your new life like, what's it like learning a new language that's a big part in the film. I've never been a migrant, but it’s something that fascinates me, the search for a better life.

 What’s your direction of travel now?

My next film is more like a queer story, more script-based and we're aiming for a bigger budget.  Down River is like a resumé of whatever I've been doing till now, but archive is still interesting.

This interview accompanied by film stills is published here: https://theprisma.co.uk/2025/05/19/downriver-memory-and-exile-in-the-waters-of-glasgow/