By Karl Quinn
Colombian filmmaker Simon Mesa Soto has won the $140,000 top prize at the Melbourne International Film Festival for A Poet, a sardonic dramedy about a washed-up middle-aged wordsmith who gets a shot at redemption courtesy of a promising young student.
A Poet was chosen by the seven-person jury headed by chair Charlotte Wells (writer-director of Aftersun) as winner of the Bright Horizons competition, which comes with one of the richest cash prizes on the planet. It was selected from a field of 10 features by first or second-time filmmakers.
Mesa says his film is deeply personal, inspired by a crisis of faith not unlike that experienced by his anti-hero Oscar (Guillermo Cardona).
‘I will pay my debts’: A delighted Simon Mesa Soto has won the $140,000 Bright Horizons prize at MIFF.Credit: Paul Jeffers
Making his first film five years ago, he says, “I had a lot of frustration, and we finished during the pandemic so had to put it on hold for a while. I’m also the producer, so it was hard. It took a lot of energy for me to do it.”
Mesa also teaches film part-time at university in Medellin, and the grind of making a feature made the 39-year-old wonder if that might not be a better life choice. “I was thinking that maybe I would dedicate myself to teaching full-time. And then I started thinking who would I become, if I quit cinema, in about 20 or 30 years?”
He pictured himself ending up like some of his own professors at university, some of whom led “this bohemian kind of life”, he says – which manifests in his film as drinking to excess, passing out on the street and refusing to take responsibility.
“I was afraid of becoming that way, so I decided to make a film about the worst version of myself,” he says. “But I thought I would make it about a poet because the world of poetry was very amusing for me.”
And it has amused, and resonated with, many others too, winning the jury prize in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes and currently enjoying a healthy 8.2 score on IMDb (whose founder Col Needham was among the jury members at MIFF).
And what will he do with the prize money?
“In Colombia, making cinema is like being unemployed – you have to invest a lot of time in cinema without necessarily paying the bills; that’s why I teach,” Mesa says. “So I’m gonna pay my debts.”
This is the second time at MIFF for Charlotte Wells. The first was in 2022, when her debut feature Aftersun was one of the contenders for the Bright Horizons prize in its first year. She didn’t win – though that didn’t hold her film back in the slightest – but she knows exactly how important a showcase like this can be for an emerging filmmaker.
Jury chair Charlotte Wells was in the hunt for the prize in 2022 with her debut feature Aftersun. Credit: Paul Jeffers
“It’s such a substantial financial prize, it gives people the scope and freedom to either make something, if they’re ready, or it gives you the time to write another film, depending on people’s processes and how quickly they move.
“It’s nice to come back,” she adds. “And I think there’s something really inspiring about watching early career work – there’s a fearlessness to it. It’s just been a pleasure to watch these films.”
The other major prize awarded at a ceremony on Saturday night was the Black Magic Design Award for an Australian filmmaker, a prize of $50,000 plus camera equipment valued at $27,500. It went to 30-year-old James Robinson for First Light.
The nominees: (L-R) Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke, Simon Mesa Soto, Diego Cespedes, Chie Hayakawa, Andrew Patterson and James Robinson.Credit: Paul Jeffers
Shot in the Philippines, where his mother was born, the film focuses on a Catholic nun’s crisis of faith.
For Robinson, who spoke Tagalog while growing up in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs but stopped when he got in trouble for doing so in primary school, “the film was almost an excuse for me to go back to my mother’s country and reconnect with the culture and with Tagalog. It’s been really beautiful.”
No one will mistake London-based Robinson, who identifies as queer and whose primary occupation is as a stills photographer, for a middle-aged nun. But he says First Light is also a deeply personal film.
“It was born out of this fury with the Catholic Church,” he says. “But over time, when reconnecting with the Philippines and also just ageing, [I realised] there was a very fine line to walk.
“The core ethics of Catholicism are so beautiful and kind, and teach people to care for one another and treat each other how they wish to be treated,” he says. “I wanted to make a film that walks a very fine line of being very respectful and praising the religion itself, but being critical of how politics can co-opt a religion to control people.”
MIFF concludes on Sunday with encore screenings of some of the Bright Horizons titles. Details: miff.com.au
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