After losing his job, an Australian-Italian art historian unravels in Rome in the wake of a loss he has not yet fully confronted. Carrying the lingering presence of his eight-year-old daughter, Lucia, he embarks on a tender road trip in a vintage Fiat X1/9 through sites of personal and historical resonance — Lago Trasimeno, Eremo Le Celle, Florence — toward the ancient Tiber River, where the personal and the historical converge and what has been submerged can no longer be avoided.

Directed by Australian filmmaker Dominic Allen (MIFF Emerging Australian Filmmaker Award for Two Men; creator of the internationally presented immersive work Carriberrie), TIBER marks his narrative feature debut after years working across documentary and immersive forms. Co-written with Miles Allinson, and shot in Rome, Cortona and Florence by DOP Joel Betts with a score by Rose Riebl, the film is an intimate, formally restrained meditation on grief, memory and presence. Structured around enduring works — Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, Michelangelo’s Night and Day — and anchored by the perpetual flow of the Tiber River, the film inhabits the space where tenderness and denial coexist, and where love persists without the comfort of resolution.