Interview: ‘A Poet’ filmmaker Simón Mesa Soto on How His Literary Madcap Comedy Came to Be

You probably know someone in your life who you wish would just get it together. You might love them and they might have an incredible talent bubbling at their surface, but they just can’t make it work. A Poet might very well remind you of that person.

Simón Mesa Soto’s second feature film revolves around Oscar, an erratic middle-aged poet whose unemployment leads him to more drunken nights stumbling through the streets of Medellin than anyone may want. Stuck in his ways, everyone around him wishes he would write more poetry like he did as a young artist, but he refuses to do much besides ramble about the current state of his local literature. After taking a teaching gig, he discovers Yurlady, a prodigy in his class whose poetry impresses him and makes him believe there may be a future beyond the bottle.

Soto’s film is a textured and off-kilter comedy unlike so many in the genre these days, especially due to Ubeimar Rios who portrays Oscar in his first ever film role. A Poet was Colombia’s selection for Best International Feature Film at the 98th Academy Awards and it is up for Best International Film at the 41st Film Independent Spirit Awards. As the film rolls out across the U.S., I sat down with Soto to speak about his inspirations and his process.

August Hammel: I was just kind of struck by how rare it is to see a poet as a protagonist in film, if it’s not like a biopic of someone and how kind of original, it just struck me, but what brought you to that occupation as, you know, would that a poet would be the leading force of the film?

Simón Mesa Soto: It was two things. I [have] known this world for about 10, 12 years. I’ve been involved with some kind of people that I know or things, poets. In particular, the poets here in Medellin, Colombia, I found very interesting, very particular, especially that figure of the poet who is the average poet who is a dreamer or talks idly about his work, like a utopian figure. I went to poetry readings and I always found them interesting, but I didn’t know back then if I wanted to do a film about them, I just found them interesting. When I finished my first film in 2020, I had this feeling of frustration because of how difficult it is to make an independent film in Colombia. I mean, everywhere, I guess in the States as well, but here it’s very difficult and you have to be unemployed to have free time, to write scripts or find money and everything. Years and years without knowing if it’s going to be successful, but when I finished my first film, I was 30-something and I was living off of being a [cinema] professor. I didn’t secure any stability in my life. It was the pandemic, so we had to put [the film] away and wait for the next year. I had this crisis about giving up my dream or my ambition of making cinema and I thought that maybe I will be a full-time professor, and that I won’t be stressed about cinema. But then I started thinking about what kind of professor I would become in 20 years if I give up this dream and I start thinking that maybe I’ll be this kind of guy who, in his 50s or 60s, is talking about the little success in the past, or is a bohemian, like many of my own professors or my other poets that I see around. That’s when I made a connection, that I wanted to talk about myself, about my dilemmas as an artist, in a way, but I found it more interesting to portray that future self of mine through a poet, rather than through a filmmaker because the world of filmmakers here is not that interesting, or it’s just boring, I guess. I’m joking, it’s not that boring, but I think the world of poets — there’s something because these guys kind of live in the past because it’s an art form of the past — has this aesthetic from the past. You feel his reverence for the past poets and his idolization and frustration with the current moment and the stratification that he’s stuck in. 

AH: The cast, I was researching everyone because I was so taken with their performances and I was struck to realize that a lot of them are first time performers or at least [their] first time on-screen. How did you go about casting the film and how did you go about finding your lead?

SMS: A lot of them are professionals. The thing is, they merge. We wanted to cast like professional actors for the main roles and also do a casting process in the universe of the poets or writers or artists from this, let’s say, underworld of the artist, from that generation here in Medellín, to have a sense of reality, like a documentary, about them. I wanted to merge these two things. The beginning was more about finding the professional actors, especially for the main character. I actually did a lot of casting for professional, popular actors here in Colombia. I worked with a few of them, in the meantime we were doing this casting with the real characters, the real poets, the real artists. At that point, a friend of mine sent me a Facebook profile of Ubeimar [Rios] and I saw him and said, “This is quite a particular guy, but probably is going to be one of those poets who is around.” At that point it was, “Oh, this guy is interesting, but I’m looking for a professional actor,” because the film was quite demanding for the main characters, with a lot of dialogue, a lot of physical actions with too many scenes, and I wasn’t sure. It was a risk to have a non-actor, but I was a bit surprised by Ubeimar. I kept on pursuing this idea of having a professional actor, but he was always there, and maybe because he was so particular in the way he is, it was also difficult to see.

Now that the film is there, you can see the result, but when you’re making a film, everything is a risk and is your decision. At the same time, we wanted to do this film with a lot of freedom to play around, to enjoy the process, and not think too much. We did another test with Ubeimar and he was a good actor, even though it’s his first time. He’s very good in front of a camera, very natural and organic in front of a camera. He has this particularities that is him, in the way he speaks, the way he moves, the way he pulls his pants up a little, some little details. It was different than the version I had written in the script. It was more sober, less comical, but it was also my reflection on letting the comedy take over at the same time. It was the first time I was so radical in terms of comedy, so I was letting the comedy take over the script and one of those decisions was to have Ubeimar and he went through a process. For the girls, it’s difficult to find a professional actress that young in Colombia. We don’t have that much of a tradition of cinema actors that young, so we looked everywhere, but we mainly looked in high schools and in Medellín and that’s where they showed up. They were amazing, there’s a few professional actors there. Then we went through a process of like two months, almost daily, working mainly with Ubeimar to understand the character and how cinema works in film because he had no idea. Through that process, he started becoming like an actor, knowing the technicalities of it and it was a very interesting process working with them, trying to have them play around to have some connection between them with an acting coach. It was a very important process for us to prepare and rehearse each scene. We kind of shot the film on video in those rehearsals and because we were shooting on 16mm and we didn’t have much film stock. We only had like one or two takes per shot, so we couldn’t improvise during the shoot, but we could play around a lot during those two months.

AH: A lot of it feels very captured in the moment and very intimate. There’s an urgency and it adds to the kind of dryness of the comic moments, but also the sincerity that comes through in the editing and the writing. You said something earlier about the freedom of wanting to explore on set and the film being kind of an expression of freedom. There’s a throughline with moments of Yurlady when she’s captured in solitude, she’s just basking in the sunlight. That comes back around with Oscar. How did that come about as a recurring motif for you in the script and what is that notion of kind of artistic purity for you?

SMS: When I think about the film, it talks about me. I think making a film is almost like going to the therapist. You see this result and it’s all about you. What I was telling about my first film is like giving up cinema and this general frustration and sometimes, when you’re an artist, you feel that you have to struggle, you have to suffer to create, that you sacrifice to the world or something. There’s a lot of things that I was not happy with as an artist. I wanted to get rid of those, to enjoy life, as I do the process. One of the reasons this film is a comedy is because I wanted to enjoy the process of making this film because my first experience was a bit hard to raise funds, you had to struggle, you had to work. I used to have a more pessimistic view of life through art, in a way. I want to get rid of that myself. So it’s this thing of the light or even the character, Yurlady, is a way of finding this poetry. This is not really a film about poets or poetry, the poetry that I try to depict in the film is more the poetry that is everywhere, in the arts, it’s more like finding that light in your everyday life, to find meaning in everything and not be obsessed with success. There’s a guy from the United States who told me, after watching the film in the United States, “We’re obsessed with recognition. You have to be successful,” and he was moved by the film because it’s this idea of success, but I was trying to depict the contrary in a way. It doesn’t matter. This idea of freedom is doing whatever you want, no matter. It’s enjoying that process and laughing about everything and not caring too much about judgment, putting in music I want, cutting as I want, not thinking too much but enjoying this process. This idea of the light comes, early in the script, [Yurlady] is that representation of the light, of that accomplishment, the real poetry, the real art in the process. For me, I am this poet finding this light through Yurlady. What she represents for me is the little things, the small things, the enjoyment of life in the purest way.

AH: Art for art’s sake, in a way. You shift so seamlessly between absurd comic moments and those more heartfelt moments. I’m sure a lot of this work is with your editor trying to sift through the footage that you’ve captured and arrange everything to your liking, but the editing did strike me as a big tool in the comedy. How did you go about that? There are so many hard smash cuts from scene to scene that always got a giggle out of me.

SMS: We knew that it was going to be like that from the script. Ricardo, the editor, and I, we were friends from film school. He’s the editor of my previous work, so we talked about it a lot and we knew the style that we were pursuing. This is a very low budget film, it was a risk to shoot on 16mm because we didn’t have much film stock. We wanted to create a film that looked like a documentary, that the camera is looking for the characters in a very spontaneous way, but we knew that we had to create that sense by knowing where the camera goes, not as an accident because we didn’t have much money. We planned that a lot and we knew those core things and those movements of the camera. So the editing was quite fast, but when we were in the editing room, we started playing with that a lot, we took it more to an extreme, like a bit careless. Looking at the first cut, you might say, “Okay, this is gonna be bothering for so many people, cutting like that,” but at the end, it’s new for us. If we keep all this ugliness — ugliness was a concept on the film for us — it looked rough and dirty and ugly and cut like that. The concept is unified in a way. So we went more radical with cutting to music as well. We started experimenting in the editing room and we felt it was working for us. We liked that.

AH: Say more about ugliness as a driving force because that is so fascinating to me and that’s something I really appreciate in any art form, but it is something that’s very absent in a lot of American art and Western art generally, everything needs to be corporatized or safer. So how did that drive you? Did that give you a greater sense of freedom on set?

SMS: I wanted to be radical in terms of how art cinema works, especially from my point of view of my surroundings here in Colombia. There’s this idea of how we have to make art, what kind of art should we make? This is something that I wanted to talk about in the film and how we do make sense for foreign audiences, mainly. We make films to please others, and at the same time, we don’t really think about our own audience in Colombia and I wanted to create something that was popular— not commercial like a blockbuster — but popular in terms of an arthouse film. In a way, independent cinema, but it talks to the audience. In Colombia, we tend to do for cinema abroad. I was trying to do the opposite of every trace of this kind of cinema that is made here and I made as well because I’ve done things like that, of course, like a comedy of it. So it’s being radical in terms of the opposite concept. This roughness is very uncommon here in cinema, nowadays, especially in countries like Colombia. We wanted to create this concept that had no references. Of course, there are references like the Dogma 95 in Denmark or The Office TV show or documentaries. We referenced documentaries from the 80s and 70s in the United States, for instance, because we thought that was new, different. That kind of concept, images were new in terms of the film we wanted to make. We wanted to have it all rough and the beauty of the ugliness as well, the reality that it gives. I always thought that I wanted to make a documentary about poets, so I wanted the film to look like a documentary. But the idea of the camera moving like that, the roughness, it was a bit like the head of this guy, Oscar, who is a character who has some unbalance in his head. He’s a bit crazy and that’s how he works, so we were trying to catch that through the storytelling.

A Poet is currently in select theaters from 1-2 Special.

• Author
• Recent Posts

August Hammel

August Hammel is a recent graduate from San Francisco State University’s journalism program. He was born in San Diego and lives in San Francisco. When not writing, he can be found in a theater as he searches for what he wants to write about next and why. August can be reached at his email augusthammel@gmail.com.

Latest posts by August Hammel (see all)

• Interview: ‘A Poet’ filmmaker Simón Mesa Soto on How His Literary Madcap Comedy Came to Be - February 4, 2026