Italian sales agency Lights On has picked up international rights to Manuel Ponce de León's debut feature In All My Journeys I Am Returning ahead of its world premiere at the Locarno Film Festival. The film — titled Todos mis viajes son viajes de regreso in Spanish — will screen in Locarno's Filmmakers of the Present competition, a section focused on emerging directorial voices. It marks the fifth consecutive year that Lights On, co-founded and run by managing director Flavio Armone, has placed a film in that same competition strand. Variety

The film is set in early 19th-century Colombia and follows a young Swedish couple navigating up the Magdalena River in search of a fabled gold mine. Ponce de León shot the 89-minute feature along that same river, using the colonial-era town of Honda as his production base. Cinematographer Angello Faccini, a long-time collaborator, shot the film in sepia tones. Dialogue runs across four languages — Spanish, Swedish, French and Polish — with English and French subtitles for the Locarno screening, according to the festival's official programme page. Locarno Film Festival

Ponce de León studied filmmaking in Berlin and art history and philosophy in Colombia. His father is a poet, and poetry and literature have shaped his work throughout. The film's title borrows from Colombian 20th-century poet León de Greiff and his line "All journeys are journeys of return." Two earlier short films preceded this debut; one of them, Beyond the Night, was also filmed on the banks of the Magdalena near Honda. Variety

The casting delivered a coincidence that reads like fiction. Swedish actor Camila Bejarano Wagner, who has a Colombian mother, discovered during the casting process that her own grandmother had been León de Greiff's lover. The family still holds handwritten love letters and postcards from the poet — the same poet whose words gave the film its title. Variety

The 2026 Locarno Film Festival runs in Locarno, Switzerland. The festival schedule lists a screening of the film at the GranRex venue at 12:00 PM. ScreenDaily and Ioncinema both independently confirmed the film's place in the 2026 lineup when the full programme was announced in early July. ScreenDaily

For Ponce de León, the Locarno premiere is a first feature landing on a major European festival stage. For Lights On, it is a continuation of a track record at a competition that spotlights exactly the kind of filmmaker he is. The international sales pickup means the film now has a route to distributors and platforms beyond the festival circuit — and beyond Colombia.