To its credit, the 50th edition of the Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF) is loaded with buzzy titles and awards favorites, in addition to its solid slate of retrospectives and filmmaker spotlights. There are plenty of must-sees this year, among them Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab (2025), based on a six-year-old Palestinian girl’s frantic phone call to the Red Crescent, Óliver Laxe’s devastating desert allegory Sirat (2025), and new work by Hong Sang-soo (The Day She Returns, 2026), Werner Herzog (Ghost Elephants, 2025), Lav Diaz (Magellan, 2025), and Nadav Lapid (Yes, 2025).
But if there’s one film on the program that is worth the effort, it has to be Colombian writer-director Simón Mesa Soto’s A Poet (2025). A jury prize winner in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard, A Poet has been lurking on festival sidelines for almost a year, picking up acting prizes for non-professional actor Ubeimar Rios — at the International Film Festival of India in Goa, for example — and accolades for the film at the Goya Awards in Barcelona, the Independent Spirit Awards and the San Sebastián International Film Festival, among others.
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Rios plays aging Medellín-based poet Oscar Restrepo, a one-time literary sensation whose best days seem behind him. He’s divorced, living with his mother and has a case of writer’s block so intense that he spends his nights crying and raging at strangers about the sad state of Colombian literature and his own misery. To avoid getting turfed by his family, he takes a job teaching poetry at a high school, where he meets poetry prodigy Yurlady (newcomer Rebeca Andrade).
What follows is a combination of My Fair Lady (1964) and absurdist satire, shot in gritty 16mm, in which Soto asks where the dividing lines are between noble starving artist and middle-aged failure, while farcically exploring art as industry. Rios is tremendous as the sad sack Oscar who manages to make every bad situation even worse, particularly by barrelling ahead with his plans to make Yurlady the kind of sensation he was, regardless of what she wants. A Poet is an unsentimental, wry, timely and entirely human exploration of the creative process and the cost of authenticity.
