!['A Poet' Review: Prize-Winning Comedy Of Manners Gently Skewers The Festival Audience It Was Made For [Cannes]](https://cdn.theplaylist.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/06104749/a-poet-cannes-un-certair-regard.jpg "'A Poet' Review: Prize-Winning Comedy Of Manners Gently Skewers The Festival Audience It Was Made For [Cannes]")
Some films announce themselves with scale or spectacle; others sneak up with something thornier, stranger, and more human. “A Poet,” Colombia’s official Oscar submission and the latest feature from Simón Mesa Soto, arrives with that second kind of voltage — the sort born from humiliation, cosmic irony, and the painful comedy of artistic self-delusion. The new trailer for Mesa Soto’s Cannes-laurelled film has premiered, signaling the arrival of a standout international discovery from a filmmaker who has been steadily climbing the festival circuit for a decade.
Winner of the Jury Prize in Un Certain Regard, “A Poet” immediately carved out its own lane at Cannes earlier this year, and the chorus since has been striking. Filmmaker Nathan Silver praised its approach as “a mixture of the tragic and comic so deep you can no longer tell the two apart,” while Alex Ross Perry called it “uncomfortable, ridiculous, rewarding and hysterical,” adding that it sidesteps all the usual cartel clichés and instead becomes “a universal story about failure, ego and humiliating artistic ambitions.”
Those ambitions belong to Oscar — a middle-aged, washed-up writer drifting through Medellín in a haze of booze, resentment, and self-pity. Played with darkly comic pathos by first-time actor Ubeimar Rios, Oscar’s life has collapsed into a kind of shambling routine: unemployed, living with family, and muttering about the death of Colombian literature. But when he’s offered a chance to mentor a young student, the universe dangles something like redemption… before responding, naturally, with its own cruel sense of poetic punishment.
Mesa Soto, who both wrote and directed the film, surrounds Rios with an ensemble that includes Rebeca Andrade and Guillermo Cardona, crafting a farce rooted in bruised ego and the mundane humiliations of artistic failure. Produced by Simón Mesa Soto, Juan Sarmiento G., and Manuel Ruiz Montealegre, the film extends the director’s fascination with characters caught between aspiration and reality, but here with a funnier, rawer edge.
Distributed by 1-2 Special, “A Poet” opens in New York and Los Angeles on January 30, with a nationwide expansion to follow.
