Shot on high-8 video, transferred to 16 mm, and then cleaned up in high-definition, Laurin Federlein’s debut feature “Build a Ship, Sail to Sadness,” which begins a one-week engagement at Anthology Film Archives today, has an unrepentantly ugly digital-analogue-digital patina that takes some getting used to. Commencing abruptly, shaped with jump cuts, and built around improvised conversations between Vincent (Magnus Aronson) and a varied cast of Scottish Highlands locals playing themselves, the film’s opening scene serves as an inoculation against any possible ill effects from the 69 minutes of provocatively cheesy-looking and raggedly timed deadpan events to come.

Vincent has arrived in rural Scotland astride a moped, dressed in a blue raincoat and red metal flake crash helmet, on a mission to “take away the loneliness and bring the glamour” by providing the locals with a mobile discothèque, which is still in the planning stages. What we soon discover — but Vincent can’t fathom — is that nobody he encounters is lonely. No one, that is, but himself.

“I’m not a saint; I’m a repairman,” Vincent offers as he parries every gentle rebuff from shopkeepers, mobile home salesmen, and peat farmers. “I’m a bit like a doctor coming to heal people.” Vincent’s enthusiasm, fueled, quite literally, by frequent stops to inhale fumes from his moped’s gas tank, is unflagging. Envisioning a four-wheeled, 120-beat-per-minute utopia where “there will be no distinction between a clown and a gentleman,” Vincent tilts at the windmills of apathy in a community healthy and connected enough to tolerate him even as it rejects his offer. As the film putters along, it cozies up to Vincent’s low-rent messianic entrepreneurship and burrows into his petroleum-addled mind with the same goofball egalitarianism that Vincent seeks to share.

“Build a Ship, Sail to Sadness” was made for 5,000 euros as a British film-school thesis project undertaken by its German director (Mr. Federlein) and Swedish star (Mr. Aronson). But the film’s cinematic primitivism is a core strength, not a compromise or a liability. Mr. Aronson, who also wrote the appropriately naïve and sweet songs that slowly take over the soundtrack and his character’s consciousness, courageously vanishes into Vincent, a human creation utterly believable in his unwavering commitment to a totally superficial and irrelevant crusade. “It’s not about me,” Vincent insists, but thanks to Mr. Aronson’s clarity and Mr. Federlein’s evident trust in his star, and skillful deployment of a supporting cast of non-actors, we know better from the outset.

Though Mr. Aronson’s Vincent invites positive comparison to Steve Coogan’s similarly delusional and egocentric made-up show-business personality Alan Partridge, and Mr. Federlein’s labored silences and visual non sequiturs hint at any number of cheeky modernist farces of the post-Wes Anderson variety, “Build a Ship, Sail to Sadness” is surprisingly free of the cynicism of the former and the preciousness of the latter. Gently but firmly positing vision with delusion, conviction with self-deception, and missionary zeal with narcissism, “Build a Ship, Sail to Sadness” checks in with head-in-the-clouds humanity at a gravel-road and cow-pie level. One would have to go back to “Nuts in May” and the other dignified and magnanimous celebrations of stupidity and tenacity that director Mike Leigh made for British television in the mid-1970s to find anything resembling the keen perception of this unusually eloquent micro-budget farce.

Through February 7 (32 Second Ave., between 1st and 2nd streets, 212-505-5181).