"A professor threatened me with death because he said the movie is a portrait of him"

BarcelonaThe Colombian filmmaker Simón Mesa Soto (Medellín, 1986) won the Palme d’Or for best short film at the Cannes Film Festival in 2014 with his master’s final project at the London Film School, where Carla Simón was one of his classmates. A decade later, the difficulties in making his second film brought on doubts and fear. What if his initial success had been a mirage? Would he end up just being a professor, after his dream of cinema was forcibly put aside? These concerns eventually materialized in A Poet, a very funny and at the same time very bitter comedy that premieres this Friday and has a wonderful protagonist: Óscar Restrepo, a poet who won an important award at a very young age and who, now old and failed, wallows in his vital defeat in alcohol and self-pity, lives off the pension of an elderly and sick mother, and uses his literary aspirations (“I am a poet!”) as a trench to shelter himself from work. “What you are is unemployed,” his sister reasonably retorts, pushing him to accept a job as a literature teacher.

“Being a professor is what has allowed me to pay the bills –Mesa Soto tells ARA via video call–, and this film came about from imagining myself at 60 years old as a professor who won a Palme d’Or when he was young but ended up giving up on cinema 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 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 think that comes through in the result –says the director–. Deep down, the idea was to talk about my worst version twenty years from now 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, finally take 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 the father of an adolescent with whom he has almost no relationship. The problem is that the student poet is more interested in painting her nails than in giving recitals, and the renowned poet insists that she move on to “important themes”: the poverty of her environment, structural racism…

It is not difficult to see in these suggestions 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 to them – admits the director–. A poet was my attempt to do something else, or at least to laugh at it a little: especially 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 adopt certain themes as personal only because they can be financed. And I wanted to generate a reflection that would hopefully reach the project labs in Europe".

Rhymes between cinema and literature

Although they are very different works in reality, it is easy to establish connections – and even an assonant rhyme – between Un poeta and a recent success of Latin American literature, the novel Un poeta chileno by Alejandro Zambra, which explores the figure of the failed poet and the obsession with poetry, as well as 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 kill me because he said my film was 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, a natural actor with no dramatic experience, as the protagonist. “He is the uncle of a friend of mine who sent me his Facebook profile to cast him – recalls Mesa Soto –. 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 speak, because it was as if he were stealing the character from me. And he changed my perspective on Óscar, he gave him all his physicality and a lot of empathy, and 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 group. “Above all, he is a rocker – emphasizes Mesa Soto –. He loves rock and organizes a poetry festival and a rock festival in his town, Rionegro”.