It isn’t a good sign early in “A Poet” that Oscar (Ubeimar Rios) spends more time giving an introduction to his latest work than to reciting any poetry, sitting back as his past achievements are read aloud at a local literary gathering and compounding the build-up by offering his own remarks, which need to be cut off if the evening is to end at a reasonable hour. It’s a big night for him when as one might imagine there are few public opportunities to speak, but still it might not be big enough for someone who once held such promise, receiving one accolade after another at the start of his career that he can still list in his biography, yet now doesn’t look forward to a life in the classroom where the teenagers he’s supposed to inspire don’t appear to pay him much attention. Still, grading papers yields at least one discovery when it seems like one of his students Yurlady (Rebeca Andrade) seems to have great potential if not much actual interest when it comes to expressing herself, hiding a deep soul behind an indifferent exterior.
While “A Poet” may be about how little elegance there is in who ends up with a sustainable career in the arts and who doesn’t when talent can be bestowed to those that aren’t inclined to use it and those that aren’t aren’t try to make it up with stubborn persistence, potentially to their own detriment, there is a lot of poetry in Simón Mesa Soto’s savagely funny second feature that isn’t part of the story but rather in how it unfolds. Perfectly attuned to its messy lead character with chaotic camerawork replete with scratches from Super 16mm film stock, the film reveals unexpected profundity in Oscar chasing the life of a true artist that eludes him as Yurlady shrugs her shoulders at her natural gifts, wondering what may be the greater tragedy. Then again, the saddest thing to see may be watching as Oscar tries to hitch his wagon onto Yurlady’s star as he hopes to get her one of the few grants available to any writer in his neck of Columbia, given only to someone at the start of their career, and he’s put through a wringer of indignities when he wants it more than anyone else does to bolster his reputation, acting less mature than his 15-year-old protege even if he’s nearly quadruple her age.
A major delight at the Cannes Film Festival where it took home the Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard section and subsequently picked as Colombia’s official entry at the Oscars, “A Poet” arrives this week in U.S. theaters and Soto spoke about how making it picked up his own spirits after the dispiriting experience he had after making his debut feature (the quite good “Amparo”), finding that making a film with more local appeal broadened the audience for it globally and the discovery of Rios, who is sensational as the shameless professor in his first film role.
How did this all come about?
It came from frustration. [laughs] It came from the dilemmas of making cinema in Colombia. Of course, I have a nihilistic view of life in general, and in my process of becoming mature, it’s like learning to get rid of that idea of being the pessimistic, suffering artist. When I made my first film, it was hard, and I was a bit frustrated with the process. I was in my thirties and I didn’t have any stability. I devoted my youth to cinema, and I didn’t care [about anything else] at the time, but as you grow old, you feel, “Oh shit, this is not giving you stability. This is the art.” And you start thinking about other things. I thought about quitting my job, and I’m a professor as well, teaching cinema, so I was thinking I will become a full-time professor and then thinking “What’s the worst version of myself would be if I quit cinema in 20 years? Let’s make a film about that. But I thought it was more interesting through poetry, especially the poetry that I know here in Medellin with these funny characters, these guys who are dreamers and utopians, figures who think they’re like Bukowski.
One of the things I was so moved by was this idea of how talent doesn’t necessarily line up with what someone’s interests are when Yurlady has talent, but doesn’t want to pursue it while this professor is clearly the opposite. That obviously the case in real life as far as your own gifts are concerned, but is that something you see sometimes in your students?
For me, Yurlady was a tool that I had to ask this question I ask myself a lot, like where is the real art? Where is the real poetry in the process of making art? Sometimes when you work so much in the arts or in cinema, you start being absorbed by the industry or the mechanism of it, which is a bit far from art sometimes. But I thought about this character [since] I made a few films that with non-actors and the protagonists were young girls and I was doing this social cinema, with a social background or subtext. That relationship was always very interesting – the restriction on me as director and the actresses that were not actresses, and we have in a lot of films like this in Colombia,[where] there’s an ethical question about how we take a person from an environment and we put them on a set in front of the camera, and we create a film based on that. What are the implications of that? I was curious about that.
That was the seed that eventually became Yurlady, but through her, I think this was the character that allowed me to [tackle] all the dilemmas I wanted in the film. I wanted to make a film about all my dilemmas as an artist – how to make art, where to find poetry, being a man, and I wanted to put everything, like to vomit everything there, but to create some kind of coherence in the storytelling. Through Yurlady, I find this way of depicting all my own dilemmas. I always say, I don’t go much to the shrink, but I have a therapy in this cinema. It’s my own therapy for life and I see the film, I see all my dilemmas there as a man, as an artist, as a Latin American. It’s all there.
What was it like finding the right aesthetic for it? On film, it gets all those wonderful imperfections that give it character and the frame moves around a lot to express this unsettled quality.
After I made “Amparo,” I was a bit stressed with life and it was feeling like a crisis for me and [after coming up with the idea] I always thought that I wanted to make a documentary about like rough and ugly and to feel like being in the head of this guy and how his head works just as the camera moves. Everything looks rough and ugly. But I wanted to enjoy making a film, and that’s why I think it’s a comedy. But here in Colombia, we usually make art thinking a lot about the foreign audiences or pleasing other people, and sometimes we lack freedom. So by doing something completely radical or unknown with no reference – something very weird – I could find my own freedom. I also was thinking a lot about Colombian audiences as well, because independent cinema in Colombia seeks more foreign audiences and very niche environments so I wanted to make a film that talks to people. That’s why I wanted to be hectic and funny and sad and dramatic and emotional. I was thinking about my mother who could see it, my brother and my friends, everyone. The harshness of the aesthetic also goes with this idea of freedom, like playing a concert that it was free for us.
What was it like finding the right person to play your lead?
At the beginning, I wanted to have professional actors and I knew it was a very difficult role with a lot of dialogue and a lot of action. We did a long casting process with professional actors, but we also made a parallel casting process with people from the real universe of the film, like poets or writers or bohemian guys around from that generation. We were doing these two casting calls and at some point, a friend of mine shows me the Facebook profile of [Ubeimar Rios] the husband of his auntie and I saw it and it’s a guy who is a professor and likes poetry. I [thought] “Okay, he can be one of those poets around the main character.” We did a little test for him, just to check how he was in front of a camera. Until that moment, I was still looking for professional actors but he struck me a bit and we started like looking at him in a different way. My idea of the poet was a bit more sober or less comic, but [gradually] became very radical. More and more as we went, as I was developing and finding the actors, the character I was thinking that was a bit more sober, but Ubeimar changed everything.
If you read the script, the movie is pretty much the way it is now, but the way he is – the way he speaks, the way he moves, the little details that gives him so much humanity and comedy and empathy is him. So he brought this with him and he went to a process for two months of rehearsing and learning the technicalities of acting and meeting the rest of the cast and at the end, he did a big job. He never acted before and he learned the craft and we shot for five weeks and during the shoot, he became the part.
He’s incredible in it and when as you say, you made this at a low point and you’ve seen all the success it’s had at Cannes and beyond, what’s this been like getting this out into the world?
It is surprising because this film was so difficult to finance. A lot of doors were closed for us when we were trying to finance the film because it was so difficult for people to understand this film, like a comedy about a Latin American third world poet? This is not very Colombian. It was a bit of a nightmare. But we were very stubborn and we were fighting a lot to show the world this movie. There was a lot of risk in that, and we hoped that the film will be great, but you never know. We were doing something that was quite weird and unknown in a way and it was a surprise for us because we shot the film in January and February last year and by May, we were in Cannes, so everything went so fast and but it was some kind of magic that we felt that the film was good enough and we were surprised because many people watched the film and loved it.
We still hear people getting so emotional talking about the film and it’s funny because the beginning of the film was about my own frustration in cinema. I wanted to depict the worst version of my frustrated self in 20 years in order to reconnect with myself in my twenties when I was so reckless and passionate about cinema to return to that passion. And in a way, it’s a happy ending for me because I was trying to find that light and to enjoy making films and to enjoy life, and sometimes when you make films, you’re so obsessed with cinema that you forget about living. And this is actually the core of the film, so it’s very therapeutic for me.
“A Poet” opens on January 30th in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Royal and New York at the IFC Center with special screenings with filmmaker Q & As in the week ahead in San Francisco on February 2nd at the Roxie Theater, Chicago at the Gene Siskel Film Center on February 3rd, the Philadelphia Bourse Theatre on February 4th, the AFI Silver Theater in Silver Spring, Maryland on February 5th ahead of a nationwide expansion on February 6th. A full list of theaters and dates is here.