Anticipate Pictures is proud to present A Poet (Un Poeta), an award-winning independent Colombian film written and directed by Simón Mesa Soto. A Poet had its world premiere at Cannes Film Festival in 2025, where it won the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize, the prestigious award given to exceptional films with unusual styles and non-traditional stories. It will begin screening exclusively in Singapore at Filmhouse on 24 September 2026.
A BLACK COMEDY ABOUT ARTISTIC FAILURE AND REDEMPTION
Pictured: Ubeimar Rios (as “Oscar Restrepo”)
A Poet is a dark satire which depicts the aging and erratic Oscar (portrayed by first-time actor Ubermar Rios), a failed writer who has succumbed to the cliché of ‘the tortured artist’. Unemployed and living with family, he wanders the streets of Medellín in a drunken stupor, lamenting the state of literature in Colombia and seeking out platforms to sell his decades-old poetry books. Some light comes to his days when he meets Yurlady, a teenage girl from humble roots, and he sets out to cultivate her writing talents. But dragging her into the world of poets may not be the way.
Simón Mesa Soto sophomore feature has been highly praised by critics and audiences, attaining an impressive 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. In 2025, it received 18 nominations at international film festivals, with 13 wins including the
Horizons award at
San Sebastian International Film Festival, Best Film at
Santiago International Film Festival, in addition to the
Cannes Un Certain Regard Jury Prize. Additionally, lead actor Ubeimar Rios received 2 nominations and
3 wins for his unforgettable performance. As Robert Abele remarks in his Los Angeles Times review, “it’s one of the best performances of this past year and if Rios never acted again, it’d be a one-off for the ages”.
AN OFF-BEAT FARCE BORNE OF THE DIRECTOR’S CREATIVE CRISIS
Mesa Soto was in a period of self-reckoning after his feature-length directorial debut with
Amparo (2021), which was also recognised at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival. “I was thinking about how I had no stability,” Mesa Soto recounts, “I didn’t secure anything in my life. I didn’t have a house or a car or a family or anything… I started thinking that maybe I’ll just forget about cinema and just be a full-time professor and have an easy life or a more relaxing life. Then I started thinking: What kind of professor I would become in 20 years? If I failed this dream of cinema, what would be the worst version of myself? [...] Maybe I might be in class, a bit drunk, or maybe I will be a bohemian or something like that.”
Pictured: Writer-director Simón Mesa Soto
So, Mesa Soto began writing a satire of himself as a middle-aged embittered artist, leaning into the pathetic and absurd. Along the way, he found himself reconnecting with his “young self” who was energised and full of zest for his art, and healing his frustrated, stressed, and worried professional-filmmaker self. Thus, despite the almost cartoonish portrait of failure, the personal story of A Poet abounds in depth and pathos, without taking itself too seriously.
After mostly making serious dramas (Amparo, Short films: Mother, Leidi), Mesa Soto approached his process and his set from a place of deep play and lightness, “like I’m in a toy shop… taking everything from the language of cinema… just to play around and to enjoy.” The result is, as the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) Jury notes, a convention-breaking film with “its refreshingly brisk pace, unpretentious use of 16mm cinematography, deadpan performances by a mostly first-timer cast and pared-back jazzy score. The film's balancing act of unflinching character study and social satire marks Simón Mesa Soto as a vital voice in contemporary Latin American cinema.”
Though hailing from halfway across the globe, Mesa Soto’s probing exploration of the artist’s dilemma continues to find universal resonance. No doubt that it will in Singapore, too. For the tension at its heart is known by striving artists and humans everywhere: that between the burning desire to fully realise one’s creative gifts, the painstaking difficulty within today’s economic systems, and the crushing fear of failure. As the MIFF Jury brilliantly describes, “A Poet is a biting fable of art as both an inescapable burden and a personal compass.”
IN CLOSING
Pictured: Ubeimar Rios (as “Oscar Restrepo”)