Un Poeta (A Poet), as seen by Simón Mesa Soto

What inspired you to begin work on this film?

I thought about giving up filming a few years ago, when I finished my first film. A sort of existential crisis. Being in my 30s, I found myself at a point where I felt I had to find the economic stability that cinema was not providing me. I thought about devoting myself completely to my other job, being a professor. Then I pictured myself in about 20 years. Who would I become if I left behind the foolishness of film making? The worst scenario I envisioned was to become one of those professors who perhaps had some flash of genius in their youth, but now they are just frustrated old-timers living off their memories. That’s when I decided I should make a film about the worst version of myself in a few years as a way to avoid becoming that. But I wanted to do it through comedy, to laugh a bit at myself and at the dilemmas of making art. The universe of poets in Medellín has always seemed to me quite interesting and funny. So I thought it would be a more compelling film if it was about a poet.

Please describe your working method and the atmosphere on set.

I worked on the script extensively and I tried to make the characters very defined from the start, so I relied heavily on what was written. We spent about two months before the shoot working with the actors on their dramatic arcs and their dialogues.

We shot the film on Super 16mm, and we didn’t have much film stock. On average we shot 2–3 takes per shot. The goal was for the actors to come to the shoot with a very deep understanding of their character, their lines and actions within each scene.

During the shooting, my intention was that we all enjoyed the process. It was great fun. The fact that it was a comedy helped a lot with that. It was a script with loads of scenes for just 30 days of shooting.

Please share a few words about your actors.

There is a mix of professional and non-professional actors from the same universe of the story. At the beginning, I wanted the main character to be a professional one, but then a friend sent me his uncle’s Facebook profile and told me “this is your poet”. It was Ubeimar Ríos. My first impression was that he was too particular, too comical. I went to his house for a quick test. He is not an actor, but his way of speaking and moving and his personality made an immediate impression on me and I handed the character over to him completely. He changed Óscar, he made him his own. He made him more endearing. Ubeimar is a high school philosophy teacher, but he is very active in the arts. He organizes a poetry festival and has a hard-rock band. He had to leave his life a bit to become an actor and, consequently, our poet.

What would you like people to remember from your film?

I intended it to be a universal story, but I thought very much about the audience in my own country. In Colombia, people are not very close to the films we Colombian filmmakers make, so I wanted to get closer to our audience without compromising the film’s narrative and artistic values.