After success in his early 20s, Óscar Restrepo's devotion to poetry has ended up taking him nowhere. Now in his 50s, estranged from his daughter and living with his mother, his life has succumbed to a cliché of unemployment, addiction, insanity and depression. Forced into a grade-school teaching job that he doesn't want, an unexpected opportunity to redeem himself arrives in the form of a remarkably talented teenage student. However, will introducing her into the sordid world of the poets only result in making her life as miserable as his own?
"I know a bit about the poetry scene in Medellín, Colombia, a country with a big poetry tradition. I think of these poets a little like “artists from the past”. They are not part of any institutionalised elite; they’re more like Bohemians, Bukowskian figures. They don’t make any money at all from their art. /.../ Oscar is even a university teacher, and I actually based him on some of my own university teachers. In their twenties and thirties, they were more functional, and then with age, they coped less well with life and things like alcohol, for example, and got into this Bohemian lifestyle that gradually took over." (Simón Mesa Soto)
Simón Mesa Soto
Born in Medellín, Colombia, in 1986. Studied Audiovisual Communication at Universidad de Antioquia, where he also worked as lecturer in film editing before moving to the UK and graduating in filmmaking from London Film School in 2014. His graduation project, Leidi, won the Short Film Palme d'Or at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival. His first feature film, Amparo, received its premiere at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival.