"I imagined myself as a 60-year-old professor who won a Palme d'Or in his youth."

BarcelonaThe Colombian filmmaker Simón Mesa Soto (Medellín, 1986) won the Palme d'Or for best short film at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival with the final project for the master's degree he was pursuing at the London Film School, where Carla Simón was one of his classmates. A decade later, difficulties in making his second film brought about doubts and fear. What if his initial success had been a mirage? Would he end up being just a professor, having been forced to abandon his dream of filmmaking? These concerns ended up being reflected in A Poet, a hilarious yet very bitter comedy that premieres this Friday and features a wonderful protagonist: Óscar Restrepo, a poet who won an important award at a very young age and who, now older and a failure, wallows in his life's defeat through alcohol and self-pity, lives off the pension of an elderly, ill mother, and uses his literary aspirations (“I am a poet!”) as a trench to shield himself from work. “What you are is an idler,” his sister rightly tells him, pushing him to accept a job as a literature teacher.

“Being a professor is what has allowed me to pay the bills –Mesa Soto explains to el ARA via videoconference–, and this film came about from imagining myself as a 60-year-old professor who won a Palme d'Or when he was young but ended up giving up on filmmaking and is now a bohemian who sometimes screens the short film he made in class.” The irony is that this film about failure has become a triumph for the Colombian director, with important accolades such as the Grand Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes and the Horizontes Latinos award at the San Sebastián Film Festival. “Yes, it's curious and it's nice, but it's a film that stems from a search for freedom and honesty, and I believe that comes through in the result –says the director–. Deep down, the idea was to talk about my worst version in twenty years' time to reconnect with the young man I was at 20, when I wanted to make films and nothing else mattered”.

Restrepo's literary ambitions, in love with an ideal of artistic purity that constantly clashes with reality, end up taking shape in one of the students at the institute where he works, an adolescent from a very humble family who writes poems of raw, sincere, and unpretentious beauty. “Oscar, this girl will be your magnus opus,” assures him the renowned poet who directs the poetry school where Restrepo takes his student to help her grow as a poet, and perhaps also to compensate for his personal failure as a father to an adolescent with whom he barely has a relationship. The problem is that the poet student is more interested in painting her nails than in giving recitals, and that the renowned poet insists that she move on to the “important themes”: the poverty of her environment, structural racism...

It is not difficult to see in these pieces of advice a reflection of the prejudices that from Europe are projected towards Latin American cinema and that, as Mesa Soto himself has verified, condition the financing of a film. "In Latin America, interest in art is always limited to certain themes or certain ways of showing ourselves, and the artist has to adapt – admits the director –. A poet was my attempt to do something else, or at least to laugh a little at it: above all at myself, but also at what surrounds me. There are films that touch on social and political themes that are very genuine, true. But there are artists who take on certain themes as personal only because they can be financed. And I wanted to generate a reflection that would hopefully reach the project laboratories in Europe.

Rhymes between cinema and literature

Although in reality they are very different works, it is easy to establish connections – and even an assonant rhyme – between A Poet and a recent success in Latin American literature, Alejandro Zambra's novel Chilean Poet, which explores the figure of the failed poet and the obsession with poetry, and also fatherhood as a space for personal redemption. Mesa Soto acknowledges that he has already been told about the similarity, but that he has not yet read Zambra's novel. “There is a book by a Colombian author, Antonio Caballero, which also talks about a failed poet with a similar dilemma –he points out–. The cursed poet is a very defined archetype of Colombian society. In fact, a professor of mine threatened to report me because he said my film is a portrait of him. I wrote to him to explain that it is a portrait of me, but he was convinced. It's curious, many people feel alluded to by the film, even those who hate it”.

What is impossible to hate is the wonderful performance by Ubeimar Ríos as the protagonist, a natural actor with no dramatic experience. “He is the uncle of a friend of mine who sent me his Facebook profile to cast him –Mesa Soto recalls–. At first, I didn't see Ubeimar as the poet, but I kept the casting and watched it again. And it was very unsettling to see him talk, because it was as if he were stealing the character from me. And it changed my perspective on Óscar, it gave him all his physicality and a lot of empathy, and it turned him into a less dark and more fragile character, making it easier to lean towards comedy”. It should be said that Ríos is already a peculiar character: a teacher by profession, he is a writer and musician, plays in several bands, and recites poetry with a metal band. “Above all, he is a rocker –Mesa Soto emphasizes–. He loves rock and organizes a poetry festival and a rock festival in his town, Rionegro”.