A Poet (Un Poeta) ★★★1/2

Availability: Showing in some theaters as part of Oscar screenings. No online or other availability at this time, except for some foreign (e.g., Brazil and France, on Telecine Amazon Channel and Canal VOD) and specialty sites. The Oklahoma City Museum of Art has scheduled availability beginning March 20 on its virtual films site here. Expected to be released on Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video, Fandango at Home and similar services a few months after the current theater run ends (distributed by 1-2 Special); therefore, likely this summer. See JustWatch here for future online and other purchase and rental availability.

The Shadow of a Hand

If you’ve assumed that a picture with the title “A Poet” ought to be deep, even profound, you won’t be disappointed with writer and Director Simón Mesa Soto’s complex film, Colombia’s entry for this year’s Best Foreign Feature Oscar. While not without humor or sentimentality, it takes up issues of personal transformation, father-daughter relationships, the subtleties of social class, the conundrum of self-reflexiveness, woke poetry and, yes, what it is to be a real, authentic poet.

Oscar (first-time actor Ubeimar Rios) finds himself in deep depression mid-life;

he's long-suffering, now-and-then desperate.

He needs to draw a heart on his chest to convince himself he is worthy.

From the earliest scenes, we’re led to believe that the “poet” we’re following is Oscar Restrepo (first-time actor Ubeimar Rios)—hunched over, sloppy (bad teeth, too; a child whispers, “he’s ugly!”). Oscar has what some (and Oscar) believe is the essence of “poet”: he’s long-suffering, divorced or separated, not quite an alcoholic, alienated from his daughter, generally unemployed, living with his mother, now-and-then desperate, and convinced that the unhappiness he daily inhabits and projects will be fertile soil for his poems. Some years ago he published two books of poetry. The first one, that included a poem about the birth of his daughter, was pretty good. His poetic idol is the influential Colombian José Asunción Silva, tormented in life and dead by suicide in 1896 at age 30, whose portrait hangs above his desk—until it doesn’t. Oscar is always thinking about what he is, and isn’t, and what he could be.

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Oscar is always thinking about what he is, and isn’t, and what he could be.

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Then, while teaching a class to earn some needed money, he meets Yurlady (Rebecca Andrade), an overweight, low-affect Black high-school student from a working-class family who draws, and writes poems, in a journal she keeps. Yurlady can be inspired by something as simple as the shadow of her hand, moving with the sun. Oscar recognizes Yurlady’s talent and takes her under his wing, encouraging her to attend the Poetry Center where she could win a prize, while introducing her to the middle-class virtues and pleasures of upward mobility and individual choice. Incredibly (for Oscar and surely most viewers), Yurlady is a hard sell. She’s into painting her nails and imagines a satisfying career as a hairdresser. Unlike Oscar, Yurlady doesn’t think much about what she is, and isn’t, or what she could be. She just is.

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Yurlady is into painting her nails.

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There’s a third idea of poetry here, represented by one of the men who runs the Poetry Center, Efrain (Guillermo Cardona, the only professional actor in the excellent cast of poets and working-class people from Medellín). Efrain, too, recognizes Yurlady’s talent, but he’s mainly concerned with the finances of the Center, and he knows what will “sell” to its funders, and what they’ll want to hear from Yurlady when she delivers her poem at the Center’s gala awards night. Poetry politics.

Nonprofessional actor Rebecca Andrade is credible as the passive, yet poetic working class high school student whom Oscar takes under his wing.

In a purposefully cringeworthy scene, Yurlady dutifully performs what others want and expect. That scene will eventually produce another, equally cringeworthy and yet riveting, involving most of the major players—Yurlady (passive, as usual), Oscar, Efrain (and his partner at the Center, Alonso [Humberto Restrepo]), and Yurlady’s fleshy family—wrestling with questions central to the film: Who is Oscar? Who is Yurlady, and what will she become? What is poetry? And—most poignantly—what are we (and Oscar) to make of Yurlady’s needy, exploitative, constantly eating, controlling, and now angry family, and of Yurlady’s symbiotic relationship to it? Oscar’s intervention in that moment is unexpected, a powerful lesson in the ethics of social class.

Director Simón Mesa Soto (left) has indicated the film is semi-autobiographical and comes out of what he calls "the worst version" of himself.

Between those two scenes, one at the Center’s gala, the other in Yurlady’s crowded apartment home, the narrative takes a long and excruciating excursion into darkly comic, farce-cum-nightmare, with Oscar and an inebriated Yurlady at center stage. Something like it is required for the plot; it’s a setup for the dramatic encounter with Yurlady’s household, and it effectively separates the “truth” we see onscreen from what her family, and Oscar’s, and others, will later imagine. But it’s too long, not credible in some respects, and it overdetermines the character Oscar, who is summarily abandoned: by the school where he teaches, the Poetry Center, the Poetry Center students who were present at the gala, by Yurlady’s silence and, in a late scene, by Oscar’s high-school-age daughter, Daniela (Alisson Correa), who harshly judges her father with an authority she hasn’t fully earned.

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There’s lots of serious stuff going on here, leavened now and then with some delicious comic moments.

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There’s lots of serious stuff going on here, leavened now and then with some delicious comic moments, among them a hyper-woke exchange between a high feminist and an indigenous poet reading in a language no one can understand. At its core, “A Poet” is the story of Oscar and Yurlady, an unlikely pair at the opposite ends of more than one continuum, sharing their lives, histories, ways of being, and approaches to poetry. You’ll know you’ve found their shared truth when Oscar sees the shadow of his hand, moving in the sun.

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He says: “A Poet” should have been nominated for Best International Feature Oscar. A better, more subtle film than the celebrated “It Was Just An Accident.”

She says: Everything about this film, and its making, is delightful, including the casting of the main character who is a high school philosophy teacher and organizes poetry festivals. A friend of the director saw him on Facebook and said, “this is your poet!”

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Date: 2025

Director: Simón Mesa Soto

Starring: Ubeimar Rios, Rebecca Andrade, Guillermo Cardona, Humberto Restrepo, Alisson Correa

Country: Columbia

Language: Spanish, subtitled in English, and an unknown indigenous language, not subtitled

Runtime: 123 minutes

Other Awards: 11 wins, including Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at Cannes, and 9 other nominations