Critics Campus 2025 participant Sophie Terakes speaks to Simón Mesa Soto about A Poet’s candid, compassionate depiction of artistic crisis and creative-industry superficiality, revealing it as a film that encourages an open attitude to optimism and change.

Óscar (Ubeimar Ríos), the titular bard of A Poet, is fascinated by black holes. It’s an interest he has inherited from the film’s director, Simón Mesa Soto, who says astronomy is a favourite subject of his. Early on, Óscar delivers a meandering sermon on black holes to his perplexed students. Later, he gets drunk and madly argues with a group of young writers about the topic, before pulling down his pants and revealing an orifice of his own. As his sister repeatedly reminds him, Óscar is himself stuck in a metaphorical hole.

Having risen to obscure stardom in his early twenties with two volumes of melancholy verse, Óscar is now washed up, destitute and living with his elderly mother decades later in Medellín, Colombia. He claims to be writing a new book but has little to show for it. Alcoholism and a flair for finding trouble have estranged him from his wife and his teenage daughter, Daniela (Allison Correa). He’s endearing and exasperating in equal measure; you don’t know whether you should embrace him or slap some sense into him.

While A Poet is far from autobiographical, Mesa Soto says there are traces of himself throughout Óscar. The 39-year-old director found success at a young age, his career already sparkled by one triumph and three nominations at Cannes before A Poet’s own Un Certain Regard Jury Prize win. Imagining a bleak alternate trajectory, Mesa Soto, who works as a professor between projects, describes Óscar as a wry portrait of himself “20 years from now, if I fail at making films”. Like his protagonist, Mesa Soto used to think his creativity was predicated on sorrow and listened “to a lot of depressing music like Radiohead” in the belief that the “best artist is the one that is … blue”. Óscar worships the work of the famously tragic Colombian poet José Asunción Silva, whose portrait hangs with the reverence of an icon on his bedroom wall. For Mesa Soto, the film acted as a kind of “exorcist for [him] to stop thinking about” art as an exercise in anguish. In moments of bitter humour, Óscar laments his failure to follow in Asunción Silva’s footsteps by dying by suicide at the age of 30. Later, in a deep pit of despair, Óscar draws a heart-shaped hole on his breast as a visual homage to the fatal gunshot wound in Asunción Silva’s chest.

But Óscar is not forsaken – a sliver of light flickers in from above. He begins teaching philosophy at the local school, where he meets Yurlady (Rebeca Andrade), a teenage girl with a poet’s intuition from a low-income family. Mesa Soto based her writing on adolescent poetry he found on the internet, searching for pieces that were “distinctive and beautiful in a very particular way”. Yurlady is uninterested in pursuing a career with almost zero financial security, but Óscar nevertheless takes her under his wing. He enters her into a competition at a poetry festival in the hopes of fostering her talent and reliving his former glory.

A Poet

The festival setting provides a stage for Mesa Soto to playfully satirise his own experiences in the Medellín art scene. Desperate to maintain the patronage of the Dutch Embassy, the festival’s organiser, accomplished poet Efraín (Guillermo Cardona), pressures Yurlady to write about her economic struggles. A similar case applies to cinema: “In order for a film to be successful” in Colombia, it needs to explore “a lot of social issues”, Mesa Soto says. “I mean, the problem is not the [exploration of] social issues; the problem is … that it becomes kind of like a market.” Within this exchange, the films that outwardly wrestle with inequality or injustice are far likelier to receive funding from the European cultural organisations that finance much of the cinema in Latin America. “I really don’t want to criticise,” he clarifies, “because I do it as well” – and it’s worth noting that Mesa Soto’s previous work includes Mother (2016), which follows an impoverished 16-year-old girl auditioning for a pornographic film, and Amparo (2021), which explores violence and corruption in 1990s Colombia. “I was feeling that I wanted to make fun of that.”

If Óscar embodies the nightmarish future Mesa Soto means to avoid, Yurlady signifies the approach he hopes to embrace. Before Efraín tries to sway her, Yurlady’s poetry is lyrical and almost diaphanous – a quality mirrored in the way she often floats her hand through gauzy streams of light, luxuriating in the sensation of warm air brushing against her skin. “I’m happy with how free [the film] is,” says Mesa Soto, harking back to this delicacy. “I like the personality it has.”

Tired of agonising for his art, Mesa Soto reflects on the joy of making his latest work: “That is my own change. I don’t want to suffer to create films, you know. I want to enjoy it and laugh about them.” The director’s upbeat attitude shines through in moments of Chaplin-esque hilarity. In a sardonically cut sequence, Óscar, whimpering with flailing arms, is pressed against a windowpane by Yurlady’s furious brother. Earlier, a static frame captures Óscar sluggishly heaving a passed-out Yurlady through a posh hotel lobby.

Yurlady’s luminosity eventually rubs off on Óscar. Near the end of the film, while sitting outside, he notices a streak of light running across his hand and looks up. Just as Yurlady relishes the afternoon sun on her fingertips, Óscar delights in the spangled rays dancing over his face. Mesa Soto, too, is full of optimism: “[A Poet] put me back on my craft … Now I’m a happy person. I have hope.”

A Poet screens on Wednesday 20, Thursday 21 and Friday 22 August as part of the MIFF 2025 program.

The above has been written as part of MIFF’s Critics Campus program. The opinion expressed is the author’s and does not necessarily reflect that of the festival.