Oscar Restrepo (Ubeimar Rios) lives a sad existence as a poet and a father to daughter Daniela (Allison Correa). The only real job a poet can do in modern times is teaching, so he takes up high school teaching. He’s not necessarily the most qualified person to be a teacher, but he’s good at talent. Specifically, he can find talent within younger minds. There, he finds Yurlady (Rebeca Andrade), an Indigenous girl with potential as well as having a deadbeat dad. He takes her under his wing and encourages her to enter a poetry festival where she gets black out drunk. A man with an unconscious teenager is not a good look, and accusations against him can potentially derail both lives.

A film like this can rely a little too heavily on archetypes, especially that of a sad alcoholic poet. And sure, maybe this film indulges in that a little bit, but it presents its story in an impressionistic way. Scenes abruptly end and new ones begin, which feel just like postmodern poems that do not follow any rhyme schemes. It only takes conventional breaks through chapter-like intertitles and by the time those come, one jives with its rhythms. It moves like this as it captures Oscar’s conversations with Daniela or Yurlady, a character study of a broken man. A Poet itself lucks out on its three main actors who evince a sense of realism that’s most likely the filmmaker’s intent.

Another aspect that A Poet is successful at is showing another angle to the complex racial dynamics in South America. This is specific to the film setting, Colombia, a country that, for the most part, has much ‘better’ racial dynamics. Perhaps one can clock my own prejudices as to how I refer to Yurlady who identifies as Black. Oscar is not a bad guy but once in a while he slips in his ‘white’ allyship with Yurlady. The same goes for the rest of the poet community who tells her to bring up race. This is the part of the film that’s relatable to the Global North who, admittedly, conflates one’s identity with race.

A Poet, through its surprisingly objective lens, captures real life in the way profound sadness finds its intersections with comedy. There is something beautiful and simultaneously funny about a teenagers writing the kind of poetry many of us used to write. The same goes for the scene where Yurlady gets so drunk that she rolls down a hilly street, sustaining injuries. Peak tragicomedy also exists with the arbitration between select faculty i.e. Oscar and others and Yurlady’s working class family. The fact that Oscar’s colleague Efrain (Guillermo Cardona) is arbitrating is ironic because he’s the creepy one. While watching this film, one can think that this will go in a few ways, but it takes enough surprising turns the way art should do.

A Poet is available to stream on MUBI which-