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 on the Locarno Film Festival.
“It’s an exceptionally daring and distinctive first feature film that we’re confident will resonate with audiences all over the world,” said Flavio Armone, co-founder & managing director at Lights On, who expressed the corporate’s delight at returning to Locarno’s Filmmakers of the Present competition for the fifth consecutive yr.
“This film has been an extended and deeply personal journey and I’m very joyful to have found a team that understands its sensibility and the spirit by which it was made,” said Ponce de León, who studied filmmaking in Berlin other than art history and philosophy in Colombia.
Set in early Nineteenth-century Colombia, “Journeys” follows a young Swedish couple as they navigate up the Magdalena River in quest 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 right 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 movies.
“The figure of the river is a component that, at first, I wasn’t even consciously aware of. It was very intuitive, until in the future a colleague asked me, ‘Why is there at all times a river? What’s the story with the river?’ And I assumed, ‘Wow, that’s true—I hadn’t realized it,’” he told Variety.
“There’s clearly a recurring presence of the river: the river as an area of memory, as a spot where different times converge, almost like a path or a vehicle through time itself,” he explained.
“My father is a poet and I feel poetry has at all times been present in my work as well. So, poetry and literature have at all times been a part of my creative universe. They proceed 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 business trade route throughout the country’s history. The colonial-era town of Honda, often known as the City of Bridges resulting from its greater 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 near Honda. I don’t really know why I’ve ended up making so many projects in Honda—I’ve developed a really strong creative relationship with the place.”
Finding his Swedish actors was serendipitous and as extraordinary as his story. As he solid 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 along with her aunts in Colombia. They asked her what the film was about and she or he explained that it was inspired by the poet León de Greiff—a reputation she herself hadn’t known before. That’s when her aunts told her something extraordinary: the grandmother she had come to go to 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 have been also personal keepsakes, including the Scrabble set de Greiff had given her, the very one they used to play together.”
Nevertheless, what really drew Ponce de León to Camila wasn’t just her story, but what she delivered to the role. “Nostalgia is one in every of the film’s central themes—it lies at the guts of the characters’ emotional conflict. From the very starting, I felt that, although Camila had been raised in Sweden her entire life, she carried a deep eager for her Colombian roots. She was intensely curious and genuinely desperate to reconnect along with her mother’s Colombia, with that distant a part of her own past. That made her an especially compelling fit for the character.”
To seek out 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 yearly, the village hosts a festival in honor of de Greiff and one in every of his fictional alter egos, Gaspar de la Noche. “It’s a remarkable thing—a distant Swedish village celebrating a Colombian literary figure.” Renowned French indie actor Denis Lavant plays a pivotal role within 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 Movies with Daniela Rocha Giraldo, Ana Winograd and Héctor Ulloque producing alongside him.
The 79th Locarno Film Festival runs over August 5-15.