‘In All My Journeys I Am Returning’ Locarno Review: A Hypnotic Voyage into the Heart of Darkness

A trip that sits somewhere between the mystical and the historical, a journey through 19th-century Colombia that is also the personal voyage of a pair of explorers, In All My Journeys I Am Returning feels less like a drama than an experience—more a mysterious space inhabited by curious figures than a conventional narrative. Karl Sigmund von Greiff and Petronella Faxe are a couple who set sail from their native Sweden toward the unexplored jungles and rivers of what, to them, is a mysterious Colombia. They dream of finding wealth in a gold mine that, they’ve been told, has made millionaires of everyone who has ventured there.

That is the narrative point of departure for something Manuel Ponce de León tells in situ, beginning in medias res, with the couple already navigating the seemingly calm waters of the Magdalena River that should lead them to their destination. But it quickly becomes clear that this destination is more uncertain than real, more imaginary than attainable. Their trajectory thus turns increasingly Herzogian—a journey that draws them deeper and deeper into a continent that may appear exotic to them but holds real and often brutal histories. It becomes a descent into mystery, an Apocalypse Now—or its literary counterpart, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness—reimagined as a minimalist European drama.

The Colombian film gradually moves into a strange, unfamiliar territory where desperation blurs into the dreamlike and adventure gives way to incomprehension, perhaps even anguish. There is a sense of rude awakening in the turns the journey takes, as if the European arrogance of believing one can arrive in Latin America and control one’s surroundings begins to backfire, like a curse written in advance. When the couple reaches a place inhabited by peculiar figures from different backgrounds—a near oneiric space where the film opens itself to cameo appearances, including the iconic Denis Lavant—the full dimension of that clash emerges, revealing the gap between illusion and what remains of it.

A tribute to Colombian poet León de Greiff—the film’s title comes from one of his poems, but also resonates in its very form—In All My Journeys… is a physical journey that becomes metaphorical, a movement from the external to the internal, from optimism to a confrontation with the inner and outer demons that beset its protagonists. By committing fully to a poetic register and avoiding almost any explicit historical, local, or political markers, the film at times drifts into a somewhat languid and diffuse tone, but this is intrinsic to its project and a risk the director knowingly takes. Even so, it remains a beautiful, melancholic film and, despite its near-constant daylight luminosity, a rather dark one.

Framed by scenes set in other time periods—echoing, in that and other ways, Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja—Ponce de León’s film opens the door to a strand of Colombian cinema that approaches the country’s history from an unusual, less conventional perspective. Within the broader renewal of that national cinema, In All My Journeys I Am Returning stands as a work that seeks to move away from realism and embrace more uncanny forms of imagination, where truth blends with nightmare.