EXCLUSIVE: While riding awards-season surf in the wake of his performance as swineherd Eumaeus in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, John Leguizamo has signed on as executive producer for Cyclovia, a new feature doc from BAFTA-winning director Finlay Pretsell shot across five regions of Colombia with the producing team behind The Look of Silence, A House Made of Splinters and Alis.

Speaking to Deadline at the Edinburgh Film Festival, where his latest film Douglas Gordon by Douglas Gordon was screening, Pretsell explained that this new project had been in development for quite some time.

“It’s a project about Colombia’s obsession with the bicycle,” he said, “which is so deep-rooted in their culture. It kind of follows on from my film Time Trial [2017], which is about professional cycling, and I kept on noticing the Colombians were these amazing riders winning the Tour de France. But I didn’t really want to make another film about cycling per se. And when I started going to Colombia, I started to notice that it’s in their DNA, and I wondered, why hasn’t there been a film made about this before? Because there’s so many different facets to it. You’ve got these amazing gravity bikers in Medellín who go down these swooping dual carriageways at 100km an hour, in and out of traffic, and all these young guys from the comunas. It’s outrageously cinematic and wild.”

Leguizamo expressed his enthusiastic support for both the project and the sport. “I love cycling,” he said. “I’ve tried it. Alas, the pros have nothing to worry about from me. But I love Latin content, and I love stories about Latin excellence, and this is both. Colombia’s relationship with the bicycle is unlike anywhere else on earth, and Finlay and this team are telling that story with the scale and the soul it deserves. I’m thrilled to be on board.”

Said Pretsell: “John getting behind this film is a gift. Cyclovia is about people who have turned a simple machine into a way of surviving, celebrating and dreaming, and John’s whole body of work is about pulling Latin stories out of the margins and into the centre of the culture. That’s exactly where this film belongs.”

Producer Sonja Henrici added, “Documentaries from Latin America still get made largely for European festival audiences. We want this one to also play in Bogotá and in the Bronx. John gives us a route to both, and he arrives at the stage where it actually changes what the film can be.”

The international co-production is backed by broadcaster commitments from SVT (Sweden) and YLE (Finland), with UK and Colombian tax credits. Public funders include Screen Scotland, the Swedish Film Institute, Film i Väst, AVEK and the Finnish Film Foundation.