A Poet

Oscar Restrepo is a poet in Medellín who showed promise as a young man and then became nothing at all. He drinks, he is in debt, his relationship with his daughter is broken. He starts teaching a poetry workshop at a school and finds a genuinely talented girl there, and his attempt to hand her the chances he missed proceeds to damage her life. Simón Mesa Soto builds this as comedy rather than tragedy. Oscar is a pitiable man and the film does not pity him. It mocks the very claim to be an artist without ever denying that the claim is real. The director had previously won the short film Palme d'Or for Leidi. This is his second feature, and it took the jury prize in Un Certain Regard at the seventy eighth Cannes film festival. It opened in Colombia on 28 August 2025. Its flaw is that the protagonist's self sabotage starts repeating, and the girl's own perspective is given too little room. Who it is for: viewers who like painful comedy and Latin American cinema. Who it is not for: anyone looking for someone to like.