How does a fugitive from five centuries ago become the protagonist of three AI films made in 2026?
In the mid 1500’s a man named Luis de Palencia boarded a ship in Extremadura, Spain, and disappeared. He left his name behind and arrived in Bogotá, Colombia as someone else. Some names take centuries to be reclaimed. This is one of them.
Eight years ago, my family completed a full genealogical study tracing our lineage to 16th century Spain. Birth certificates, marriage records, names going back five centuries. One name in particular stopped me: Luis de Palencia, born 1545 in Extremadura. Under the shadow of the Tribunal de Llerena, he boarded a ship to the New World and arrived in Bogotá as Luis Zapata de Cárdenas. He left his name behind. He is my 16th generation ancestor.
I didn’t know what I would do with this knowledge. I just knew I couldn’t let it go.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” — Carl Jung
I had been building toward longer narrative AI video work since early 2024, when The Moth Academy, a short film I made as part of Fellowship AI, opened meaningful doors. The thinking was ready, yet the generative video tools were still in early stages.
In 2026, Cristóbal Valenzuela, co-founder of Runway, published a short film adaptation of Julio Cortázar’s A Continuity of Parks. A meditative, precise piece of generative filmmaking rooted in Latin American literature. The execution was impeccable. Something shifted.
I knew immediately what I had to do. I told Cristóbal as much when we met at the Runway AI Summit shortly after. My answer was Adolfo Bioy Casares. Specifically, his 1940 novel The Invention of Morel: a story about a fugitive on a mysterious island, running from a world that had judged him for something he didn’t do. A man who had to disappear to survive.
I read the novel in 1999. I never forgot it. And suddenly I understood why.
Bioy Casares’ fugitive is not a villain. A man carrying the weight of mistaken identity, labeled and judged for something he was not. Forced to flee and reinvent himself in isolation. The moment I understood that, something else became clear: I had met this man before.
Not in a novel. In a genealogy study. In a name that crossed an ocean and arrived as someone else. Luis de Palencia had been waiting in my subconscious for years.
The fugitive in my films was never fictional to me. He was inherited.
There is a weight that transfers through generations whether we name it or not. Luis carried a heavy one. Based on epigenetics, so do I. And I finally had the tools to rewrite his story.
“The influence of the future on the past”, said Morel almost inaudibly.
— Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel
One Week in Eternity → was already finished. A five-minute narrative adaptation of Bioy Casares’ novel, over twenty years in the making from the first reading to the final frame. Luis de Palencia was its soul.
Then Runway opened two consecutive creative calls. A spec commercial. An episodic series.
Different briefs, different formats, different creative exercises. My creative strategy kicked in.
A character with enough depth can live anywhere. The same instinct that makes a fugitive compelling in a five-minute film can make him compelling in a sixty-second commercial and an episodic series if done right. Different platforms, different target audience. Same lore. Connect the dots and you have a multi-platform universe.
CINCH → introduces him. Devoted, sharp, unshakable under pressure. A man whose spiritual compass holds everything together even when nothing else does. We get a glimpse of who he is before the world forces him to run.
The Man at the Edge of Reality → picks up where CINCH ends. It reveals what he was after and leads into the beginning of One Week in Eternity, where the story concludes.
Three films. Three open calls. One universe built around a man who boarded a ship in 1565 and never stopped running.
He had to leave his name behind. I made sure he got it back.
Credits
Director, Composer & Workflow Architect: Felipe Posada
Production Entity: The Invisible Realm / LusciousLabs.ai
Script Development: Claude (Anthropic)
Image Generation: MidJourney, Google Nano Banana Pro
Video Generation: Google Veo 3, Kling 3.0 Pro
Workflows: Runway
Music: Suno
Post-Production: After Effects
Year: 2026