‘FISHGIRL’ (original Spanish title: Alucina) is a 2026 urban fantasy drama from Ecuador, written, directed, shot, and edited by Javier Cutrona.

Camila is a 24-year-old woman living with amnesia, unable to remember her childhood by the sea. To cope with these missing memories, she creates an inner world where reality and fantasy blur, and a giant fish becomes her silent guardian. As she tries to escape her fragmented past, Camila forms a connection with José, a delivery man who briefly grounds her in the real world — until he vanishes without explanation.

Forced to confront what she has been avoiding, Camila begins a search that leads her back to her lost memories and towards the truth of her own identity.

Blending drama, fantasy, surrealism, and subtle horror elements, ‘FISHGIRL’ moves fluidly between the imagined and the real, using dream logic, unsettling imagery, and quiet psychological menace to explore memory, trauma, and self-discovery.

Shot entirely in Ecuador, the film enjoyed a strong international festival run and won the Jury Prize at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

The film has been dubbed in English rather than being subtitled. Foreign film enthusiasts may find this distracting, but it does open the film up to a vast English-speaking audience.

This film did so well in the international film festivals for a reason: it’s an expression of cinema as art, and it is a magnificent work, worthy of the time you spend to see it. Fishgirl is in the grand tradition of the cinematheques, where filmmaking is celebrated as an art form unto itself. It is what the cinema was before the age of the blockbuster, and filmmaking still survives as an art in these venues. Some of the greatest directors of all time have emerged from the French cinematheques of the 1930’s and 40’s, giving us such names as François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, and Éric Rohmer, who all transitioned from being critics to filmmakers.

Javier Cutrona stands in good company.

Fishgirl is currently available for viewing on MUBI, a streaming service for independent film.