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Boutique Italian sales agency Lights On has picked up international sales rights to the debut feature of Colombian Manuel Ponce de León’s “In All My Journeys I Am Returning” (“Todos mis viajes son viajes de regreso”)
ahead of its world premiere at the Locarno Film Festival.
“It’s an exceptionally bold and distinctive first feature film that we’re confident will resonate with audiences around the world,” said Flavio Armone, co-founder & managing director at Lights On, who expressed the company’s delight at returning to Locarno’s Filmmakers of the Present competition for the fifth consecutive year.
“This film has been a long and deeply personal journey and I am very happy to have found a team that understands its sensibility and the spirit in which it was made,” said Ponce de León, who studied filmmaking in Berlin aside from art history and philosophy in Colombia.
Set in early 19th-century Colombia, “Journeys” follows a young Swedish couple as they navigate up the Magdalena River in search of a fabled gold mine. As they drift through a war-scarred landscape, time fractures, memory overtakes reality and history becomes fluid. Their voyage transforms into a haunting meditation on exile, longing and the elusive promise of belonging.
Ostensibly, Ponce de León’s studies in philosophy inform his work as does his interest in poetry and particularly that of Colombian 20th century poet León de Greiff whose line ‘All journeys are journeys of return’ has haunted him since his childhood.
Poetry and rivers run through his feature debut as they do in his two previous short films.
“The figure of the river is an element that, at first, I wasn’t even consciously aware of. It was very intuitive, until one day a colleague asked me, ‘Why is there always a river? What’s the story with the river?’ And I thought, ‘Wow, that’s true—I hadn’t realized it,’” he told Variety.
“There is clearly a recurring presence of the river: the river as a space of memory, as a place where different times converge, almost like a path or a vehicle through time itself,” he explained.
“My father is a poet and I think poetry has always been present in my work as well. So, poetry and literature have always been part of my creative universe. They continue to be a source of inspiration and a way of approaching cinema.”
He shot his drama, filmed in evocative sepia tones by his long-time collaborator Angello Faccini, along Colombia’s Magdalena River, which was a fundamental commercial trade route throughout the country’s history. The colonial-era town of Honda, known as the City of Bridges due to its more than 40 bridges, was his base. “The short film I made before this one, ‘Beyond the Night,’ was filmed on the banks of the river, very close to Honda. I don’t really know why I’ve ended up making so many projects in Honda—I’ve developed a very strong creative relationship with the place.”
Finding his Swedish actors was serendipitous and as extraordinary as his story. As he cast his net across social media and other means, he heard from a Camila Bejarano Wagner who wrote that she was Swedish but with a Colombian mother and that she’d be visiting her grandmother In Colombia so she could audition then.
“During her stay, Camila was living with her aunts in Colombia. They asked her what the film was about and she explained that it was inspired by the poet León de Greiff—a name she herself hadn’t known before. That’s when her aunts told her something extraordinary: the grandmother she had come to visit had once been de Greiff’s lover,” he related. “Camila ended up discovering postcards and handwritten love letters signed by de Greiff himself—remarkable letters addressed to her grandmother. There were also personal keepsakes, including the Scrabble set de Greiff had given her, the very one they used to play together.”
However, what really drew Ponce de León to Camila wasn’t just her story, but what she brought to the role. “Nostalgia is one of the film’s central themes—it lies at the heart of the characters’ emotional conflict. From the very beginning, I felt that, although Camila had been raised in Sweden her entire life, she carried a deep longing for her Colombian roots. She was intensely curious and genuinely eager to reconnect with her mother’s Colombia, with that distant part of her own past. That made her an especially compelling fit for the character.”
To find Camila’s counterpart, Fredrik Lundin, Ponce de León met him in Stockholm after having traveled to a tiny village called Gunnarskog, north of the Arctic Circle, where every year, the village hosts a festival in honor of de Greiff and one of his fictional alter egos, Gaspar de la Noche. “It’s a remarkable thing—a remote Swedish village celebrating a Colombian literary figure.” Renowned French indie actor Denis Lavant plays a pivotal role in the film where the dialogue is in Spanish, Swedish, French and Polish.
“In All My Journeys I Am Returning” is produced by Ponce de León’s Los Niños Films with Daniela Rocha Giraldo, Ana Winograd and Héctor Ulloque producing alongside him.
The 79th Locarno Film Festival runs over August 5-15.
