[The following text was published in Pardo, the official daily of the Locarno Film Festival.]

A boat drifts down a river, making its way through tropical rainforests. Aboard the vessel are Karl (Fredrik Lundin) and Petronella (Camila Bejarano Wahlgren), a ruling-class couple from the 19th century kingdom of Sweden-Norway. What are these Nordic elites doing in the jungles of Colombian Amazon? Looking for gold in the mountains, they say – a quest that turns out to be a century too late.

In their fluvial wandering, Karl and Petronella meet other lost souls, invented as well as historical – in the mix, the exiled Mexican general Santa Anna (Carlos Marín Aragón), the Polish colonel Napierski (Lukcasz Firla), and the shipwrecked French explorer Gaspard Mollien (Denis Lavant, who gets to do a fantastic mime number). Sharing an oneiric candlelight dinner graced by rain, these refugees lament their thwarted destinies and the impossibility of returning to what they consider their rightful place and time in history.

On the surface, In All My Journeys, I’m Returning (Todos mis viajes son viajes de regreso) is an adventure movie, with its gold prospectors, menacing interlopers, and tropical fever dreams. But the true expedition in Manuel Ponce de León’s simmering spiritual fable is not so much across a real landscape as an inner one. Presented in gorgeous 16mm textures, the film is dominated by a sense of doomed melancholy, a feeling that no one escapes the inexorable gravity of their fate.

Karl and Petronella are no different from the castaways of history they encounter. With each passing day, their senses of self grow murkier, their maps more unreliable, their destination more uncertain. The narrative unfolds largely from the perspective of Petronella, witness to Karl’s progressive disintegration. She experiences an unravelling too, hearing her father’s distant words recounting the tale of a wanderer who made clones of himself in an ill-fated attempt to return to a yearned-for but unattainable past.

Such yearning is perhaps the wellspring of all fiction – a desire to reinvent oneself and access a different place and time. In that respect, writers are wanderers too, condemned to never being able to reach their coveted home. As per its closing title card, Journeys is inspired by the “poetic galaxy” of León de Greiff, a litterateur and diplomat who was a figurehead of Colombian modernism. Ponce de León weaves together elements from the writer’s own biography along with key figures and themes from his oeuvre. Flush with anachronisms and slippages, Journeys is a hypnotic debut feature that seductively blurs the boundary between time periods, personalities, and states of being.