A Poet

There are poets who carry their whole life over into their verse — and there are poets who get stuck in their own metre. Oscar Restrepo (Ubeimar Ríos) belongs to the second kind. Decades ago he published a slim volume of poems that nobody read. No career to show for it, but plenty of alcohol and the daily humiliations of a teaching job. Then Yurlady enters his life, a young woman from the slums of Medellín whose poems pour out of her as if it cost her nothing. Her language is immediate, fresh, unguarded. Oscar sees in her a surface onto which he can project the fame he never had — but his support soon tips into something possessive.

The Colombian director Simón Mesa Soto tells this encounter as a tragicomedy that brings surprising truths to light. Shot on 16mm, the film carries the coarse texture of a world with no ornament left to it — only the hard collision of ambition and failure. This is a cinema of friction: nervous, shot through with painful humour and a melancholy that feels like the end of an era, the era in which poetry was still a male preserve. “A Poet” takes an ironic leave of it — and gives the stage to the voices that still have something to say. A co-production with Germany (Ma.ja.de Fiction) and Sweden. It won the Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes, and the CineCoPro Award at Filmfest München.

Shown at the 2025 edition of Around the World in 14 Films, Berlin.

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