‘A Poet’ Is a Movie About Artistic Frustration. For Its Director, It’s Also About the Experience of Making Indie Features

Simón Mesa Soto, who also teaches in his home country, directs the Cannes winner about a curmudgeonly, glory-less poet; it mirrors local filmmakers' own issues with trying to appease funders and appeal to a very limited audience.

I may or may not have fought personally for Simón Mesa Soto’s “A Poet” to win best narrative feature from the Montclair Film Festival when I was a juror. Can I say that? While the film did not win the top prize, also-ran-ness is a significant strand of the film’s DNA: It’s a scabrous literary-world satire about an elbow-bending poet (breakout and discovery Ubeimar Ríos) from Medellín, Colombia, who has not seen artistic glory (or even a penny from work) in decades.

He accepts a gig teaching at a local high school, where he meets promising Yurlady (Rebeca Andrade, also a discovery of the production), and decides to nurture and mentor her talent. Is it exploitation? Is she the one nurturing and mentoring him? This prickly comedy, one you could imagine 2000s Paul Giamatti starring in stateside, opens all doors of possibility. Many of them are humiliating.

Soto is on his second feature after “Amparo” played Cannes Critics’ Week; “A Poet” did win a jury prize after all, courtesy of last year’s Un Certain Regard at Cannes. To have achieved two indie features since the start of the pandemic, and out of a country that deprioritizes audiences and non-commercial movies, according to the filmmaker, is a feat. And he started shooting the movie in January 2025, and was in Cannes by May.

“We culturally don’t have that much of an appeal for our audiences overall. It’s more difficult to get the films out there. At the same time, cinemas in Colombia are having a hard time; we don’t have audiences for independent cinema,” Soto told IndieWire. Ubeimar Ríos, who plays the dark comedy’s protagonist, was cast because he was a friend of Soto’s uncle; “A Poet” employs almost no known actors that would be recognizable to a Colombian (or any) audience.

“The funding, how it works here in Colombia, is that there’s international funding, but so little funding for making the film and for earning a living. I’m a professor,” said Soto, who lives in Medellín where the film was shot. “I’ve been teaching for many years now, and that’s probably how I live. I’ve been teaching cinema as a professor at university. It depends on your background. It feels like cinema, in places like Latin America, is for more privileged people. … For people in the middle class or working class, it’s more difficult — art is a difficult task in terms of surviving. You have to have a lot of free time, to be unemployed, to devote yourself to making a film.”

“A Poet,” which is in select U.S. theaters now from the steadily climbing indie distributor 1-2 Special, is a co-production of Colombia with Sweden and Germany. Soto said that kind of globe-spanning funding is not unusual for movies out of Colombia — hell, it’s not unusual anywhere these days in the independent circuit — and it’s often the only way that human-scale stories like “A Poet” can get made. It often feels like an indie out of the ’90s, and while it doesn’t carry a massive sociopolitical message, Oscar’s middle-class to Yurlady’s lower-class creates a tension in the movie that’s common in Soto’s home city.

“When you are young, you don’t care about money. You just care about your art, as a musician or a filmmaker, but as you get older, you start realizing you don’t have a house, you don’t have a car. You’ve wasted your life making films, and you are not earning much money, so your stability is at risk,” said Soto, also inevitably speaking to the themes of his movie, where Oscar decides to hang up the hat of artistic glory to make a living.

It’s also after years of disappointing possible publishers, and “A Poet” parallels Yurlady’s local literary rise to the struggles of indie filmmakers to hew social meaning to their stories. A potential patron of her writing suggests she try to make it more “serious.” Sound familiar?

Another tells the poet that if he were his manager, he’d want him to write about Amazonians, “or violence, drug dealing, queer subjects,” said Soto. “These things are important. In comedy, it’s not that I don’t care. These films have to be made … but there are films that talk honestly and through the desire of an artist, and there is also the market side of that, the idea that I am making this film based on how appealing on the market it is. This problem takes out the freedom of the artist to make films, for us to make any art because of the way the industry works. It also happens in the United States!”

Think, like, recent mainstream horror movies that are queried for not having a sociopolitical anchor. “I don’t want to tell a student of mine, who’s trying to make a film, ‘You have to use these subjects in order to finance your film,'” Soto said. “In a way, this film is a way to say, hey, let us have a bit more freedom.”

He added, “One reason why it was so difficult to finance this film – it was not about subjects that are sellable in cinema nowadays. In Latin American cinema, we tend to do what pleases the funders, which all come from abroad, and they want to see something specific. A comedy about a poet from Colombia is so difficult to finance because it’s not one of those subjects that is in the agenda.”

“A Poet” is now in select theaters nationwide.