Part picaresque tale, part documentary, part social commentary, Jaguar is the story of three young men from the savannah of Niger who leave their homeland to seek wealth and adventure on the coast and in the cities of Ghana. Filming without the benefit of portable synchronized sound equipment, Rouch had the main characters of the film improvise a narrative while they viewed footage which was itself improvised. The resulting soundtrack consists of remembered dialogue, joking and exclamations, and of questions and explanations about what is seen on the screen. Rouch describes the film as "a series of banal adventures which happened to these people in a world which was perfectly strange to them...For me it's a little like surrealist painting: using the realist possible products of reproduction...in the service of the unreal...a postcard in the service of the imaginary."