<\/p>\n
\n\tBoutique Italian sales agency Lights On has picked up international sales rights to the debut feature of Colombian Manuel Ponce de Le\u00f3n\u2019s \u201cIn All My Journeys I Am Returning\u201d (\u201cTodos mis viajes son viajes de regreso\u201d) ahead of its world premiere on the Locarno Film Festival.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cIt\u2019s an exceptionally daring and distinctive first feature film that we\u2019re confident will resonate with audiences all over the world,\u201d\u00a0said Flavio Armone, co-founder & managing director at Lights On, who expressed the corporate\u2019s delight at returning to Locarno\u2019s Filmmakers of the Present competition for the fifth consecutive yr.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cThis 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,\u201d said Ponce de Le\u00f3n, who studied filmmaking in Berlin other than art history and philosophy in Colombia.<\/p>\n
\n\tSet in early Nineteenth-century Colombia, \u201cJourneys\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
\n\tOstensibly, Ponce de Le\u00f3n\u2019s studies in philosophy inform his work as does his interest in poetry and particularly that of Colombian 20th<\/sup> century poet Le\u00f3n de Greiff whose line \u2018All journeys are journeys of return\u2019 has haunted him since his childhood.<\/p>\n \n\tPoetry and rivers run through his feature debut as they do in his two previous short movies.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cThe figure of the river is a component that, at first, I wasn\u2019t even consciously aware of. It was very intuitive, until in the future a colleague asked me, \u2018Why is there at all times a river? What\u2019s the story with the river?\u2019 And I assumed, \u2018Wow, that\u2019s true\u2014I hadn\u2019t realized it,\u2019\u201d he told Variety.<\/em><\/p>\n \n\t\u201cThere’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,\u201d he explained.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cMy 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.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tHe shot his drama, filmed in evocative sepia tones by his long-time collaborator Angello Faccini, along Colombia\u2019s Magdalena River, which was a fundamental business trade route throughout the country\u2019s history. The colonial-era town of Honda, often known as the City of Bridges resulting from its greater than 40 bridges, was his base. \u201cThe short film I made before this one, \u2018Beyond the Night,\u2019 was filmed on the banks of the river, very near Honda. I don\u2019t really know why I\u2019ve ended up making so many projects in Honda\u2014I\u2019ve developed a really strong creative relationship with the place.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tFinding 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\u2019d be visiting her grandmother In Colombia so she could audition then.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cDuring 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 Le\u00f3n de Greiff\u2014a reputation she herself hadn\u2019t known before. That\u2019s when her aunts told her something extraordinary: the grandmother she had come to go to had once been de Greiff\u2019s lover,\u201d he related. \u201cCamila ended up discovering postcards and handwritten love letters signed by de Greiff himself\u2014remarkable 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.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tNevertheless, what really drew Ponce de Le\u00f3n to Camila wasn\u2019t just her story, but what she delivered to the role. \u201cNostalgia is one in every of the film\u2019s central themes\u2014it lies at the guts of the characters\u2019 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\u2019s Colombia, with that distant a part of her own past. That made her an especially compelling fit for the character.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tTo seek out Camila\u2019s counterpart, Fredrik Lundin, Ponce de Le\u00f3n 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. \u201cIt\u2019s a remarkable thing\u2014a distant Swedish village celebrating a Colombian literary figure.\u201d Renowned French indie actor Denis Lavant plays a pivotal role within the film where the dialogue is in Spanish, Swedish, French and Polish.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cIn All My Journeys I Am Returning\u201d is produced by Ponce de Le\u00f3n\u2019s Los Ni\u00f1os Movies with Daniela Rocha Giraldo, Ana Winograd and H\u00e9ctor Ulloque producing alongside him.<\/p>\n \n\tThe 79th<\/sup> Locarno Film Festival runs over August 5-15.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Boutique Italian sales agency Lights On has picked up international sales rights to the debut feature of Colombian Manuel Ponce de Le\u00f3n\u2019s \u201cIn All My Journeys I Am Returning\u201d (\u201cTodos mis viajes son viajes de regreso\u201d) ahead of its world premiere on the Locarno Film Festival. \u201cIt\u2019s an exceptionally daring and distinctive first feature film […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":374311,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20669],"tags":[40886,15088,4699,54409,3019],"class_list":["post-374310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-hollywood","tag-boarded","tag-journeys","tag-lights","tag-locarnobound","tag-returning"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t