How does a fugitive from five centuries ago become the protagonist of three AI films made in 2026?
In the mid-1500s, a man named Luis de Palencia boarded a ship in Extremadura, Spain, and arrived in Colombia as someone else. He left his name behind to survive. He is my 16th generation ancestor.
Eight years ago, my family completed a full genealogical study tracing our lineage to 16th century Spain. One name stayed with me: Luis de Palencia, born 1545, who fled under the shadow of the Tribunal de Llerena and crossed the Atlantic as Luis Zapata de Cárdenas.
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 work since early 2024.
The thinking was ready but the tools were still catching up (see The Moth Academy, released under Fellowship AI).
By 2026 new advancements in frontier models made the conditions right to undertake greater challenges. Mine was to adapt The Invention of Morel, a 1940s novel by one of my favorite Latin American authors, Adolfo Bioy Casares.
a fugitive on a mysterious island, running from a world that 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. He is a man carrying the weight of mistaken identity, forced to flee and reinvent himself. The moment I understood that, something 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.
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 audiences. Same lore.
Connect the dots and you begin to see something larger emerge.
What started as a single film evolved into a deliberate effort to expand the story of Luis de Palencia across formats, allowing the same character and mythology to take on new forms while remaining anchored to a shared narrative 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 narrative 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, Seedance 2.0
Workflows: Runway and Magnific
Music: Suno
Post-Production: After Effects
Year: 2026