We spoke with Ricardo Saraiva BFE about his experience editing Un Poeta – working closely with director Simón Mesa Soto in Colombia, and finishing the cut remotely from London. The film was awarded the Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard category at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

Can you tell us a bit about your background?

I’m from São Paulo, Brazil, but I'm currently living in London. I moved here about 13 years ago to study filmmaking and I never left. I started off working with colleagues from film school, cutting their short films, then their first feature films. I work mostly on drama and more arthouse, indie kinds of films that are usually aimed at film festivals. I do some documentaries when they come through, but it's mostly fiction films: drama and indie films.

Was editing always your preference or did you try other departments as well?

When I joined film school I actually wanted to be a screenwriter, but I thought I should learn the craft of filmmaking as a whole so I could be a better writer. At film school we could only use Avid. Not many students wanted to learn Avid and I was one of the few people in my class who really went for it. And because of that, lots of people asked me to edit their graduation films. Then they were asking me to come back and edit their shorts. And I just took a liking to editing – it worked for me and I think I work better in a calmer environment where we have time to think and discuss. And in a way it does go back to screenwriting, because you're still shaping the story and thinking about narrative structure and character. And I really like the one-to-one collaboration with the directors, especially in these kinds of films that I work on. It's very rewarding.

Ubeimar Rios Gómez as Oscar discovers an unexpected talent in his student, Yurlady.

Let’s look at your recent feature film, Un Poeta. It was very beautiful and moving. Can you tell me about the origin of the project?

The director, Simón Mesa Soto, was a classmate of mine at London Film School and we worked together on his graduation film Leidi, which went to Cannes in 2014. And then I cut his first feature film Amparo, which premiered at the Cannes Critics' Week in 2021. He and his DOP, Juan, who is also the producer, work together very closely and when they started preparing the project, they got in touch and said “we're gonna make this film, are you on board?” And I said “Of course!” I didn't even read the script because I know them and I like films that Simón makes, so that was a sure thing.

So the film is about a poet and it's broken up into chapters, and each chapter has its own cadence in the way that you've cut it. Can you talk about this narrative structure of the film?

Well this wasn't really planned in the script, but when I started receiving the rushes, Simón told me “I think we're gonna break it down into chapters.” And I said, “yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense.” You know, this is very different from the kind of films that he's made in the past, which were very much one take, very well composed shots, very little camera movement. And this is completely different. So when I got the rushes, I wasn’t sure exactly what he was aiming for. And he said, “let's just be kind of punk.” Let’s try different things and not get stuck in what we did in the past. So from the beginning, I was already trying to find a pace that was more energetic and a bit more chaotic.

They also shot some of the scenes with two different types of coverage: they would shoot singles of the two actors, and then they would also shoot a “dynamic shot” where the camera was moving between the two actors. And normally you wouldn't cut those two different approaches together because it's a bit messy. But we realized in the edit that we should do this, just because that would make the film more interesting and keep the energy alive.

Oscar tries to connect with his young daughter.

That opening chapter had quite staccato cuts – like you're being picked up and then dropped into the next scene. And it worked very well with where Oscar was in his life – he had no agency or control, he was just being dragged around by other forces in his life. And then later on in the film when he finds more purpose, the editing disappears a little bit more and you were pulled more into the story.

Yeah, I think we do some of these things a little bit unconsciously, we follow the material and try not to impose too much. But Oscar is a very erratic character and his mind works in a way that only his mind works, it's very chaotic. And with the editing we're trying to portray that, we make the audience go through the film as if they were experiencing that story as Oscar does. Going a little bit crazy with the editing, cutting very sharp… in the middle of the music or not letting the whole scene play until the end. To really get the audience to feel that kind of craziness that goes on in his head.

And of course, towards the end of the film, as things start to calm down, I think we also experience that through the edit as well. When he spends time with his daughter, for instance, those are scenes that are usually less cutty because this is more emotional for him. He’s a little bit calmer when he's around her.

The line his mother says, “you’re a drunk, but you're noble”, was just heartbreaking because he is so chaotic, but he really does mean well. He doesn't want to hurt anyone else, he’s just a dreamer, he’s not based in reality.

Yeah, I think that's why people end up liking him. It was so interesting because at the end of the screening, everybody wanted to meet Ubeimar, the actor who plays Oscar. He brought something human to that character who otherwise could have been someone that we feel a bit distant from, because he's just not behaving as you normally would expect someone to behave. So in the edit we tried to make sure that he was clumsy and messy but he was a nice human being. We wanted this to be clear so the audience could connect with him and I think that helps the audience to also enjoy the film.

He's also someone who is fighting against the system to some extent. He believes in true poetry and the true meaning of art, whatever that is. And when he's trying to help Yurlady and he kind of drags her into the poetry world, into the art world, he soon realizes that the world is not as beautiful as he thought it should be. He's fighting against those more powerful people - it’s just the small indie poetry world in Colombia, but still, they are in charge of what poetry and art should be in their universe, in their world. It's really frustrating for Oscar to see that there's a girl with so much potential that cannot be fulfilled because they're not allowing her that space or they want to transform her into something else, something that she doesn’t want to be.

Rebeca Andrade as Yurlady.

How much acting experience did Ubeimar have?

He had about zero acting experience, this was his first job. I believe he's a philosophy teacher, which is funny because in the film he also is teaching philosophy for a moment and he doesn't like it. They wanted someone who came from the writing and art world and he was just the perfect fit.

They didn't have a lot of time to shoot so they had to be very precise with what they were filming. And because of that, they did about two months of rehearsals with all the actors. It was shot on 16mm, there was only 17 hours of film stock to shoot. Usually on a film like this, I get about 40 to 50 hours of rushes. So less than half of what the usual shooting ratio is. And working on a very tight schedule, they had to shoot four or five scenes a day. It was really a challenge, and somehow Simón and the team made it work miraculously and the material is really good. From the rushes that I was getting every day, it was just spot on and easy to work with. You're not struggling against the rushes, you're working with the rushes.

Do you know why they chose to shoot on 16mm? As a viewer, I thought it was wonderful, it gave the film such a grounded feeling.

It was an aesthetic decision, they'd always wanted to shoot it on film. But also this film, even though it's set in present day, has got a feeling of the 80s and 90s, and Colombia also feels like it's still in the 90s to some extent. So having that look of film helped bring that feeling of nostalgia as well. And all the dirt around the frame, that was a decision to just leave it in because, again, going to the punk aesthetic, you leave things a bit dirty and not try to make everything super polished. The logistics were complicated because they were shooting in Colombia, but they had to ship all the exposed negatives to Sweden to get processed and scanned. Shipping things from Colombia, with the history that they have of drug trafficking, is not that easy and fast, and it's expensive, so they would send it in batches. The last batch actually got stuck in Colombia at the airport for three, or four weeks. So we had cut most of the film, but we were waiting for the last batch of about 25% of the footage. And when it arrived, we only had two weeks to cut it together with the rest of the film and make changes. It was quite intense those days.

Yurlady with her family.

As much as there is this sense of melancholy and pathos in the story, there are also moments that are just a bit ridiculous or funny.

All those moments were in the script, but somehow when I read the script I didn't feel the humor so much. It felt more like a drama. But when I started getting the rushes, watching the scenes, I was laughing. Again, I think the casting is so spot on: those characters, they bring some sort of humor without trying to be comical. Simón gave direction to the actors to not try to be funny – just play the lines naturally, without trying to be comic, because that's where the humor is going to arise.

If you look at Simón's previous films, there isn't that kind of humor. So that's also very new to his filmmaking. But that scene of her rolling, when I saw that in the rushes, I was like, this is insane, it’s so funny. In that particular moment, when we had the screening in Cannes, people started clapping. I had never seen this before. And I think because the humor was building up at that point, people just felt like they wanted to let it out and people started clapping and it was a magical moment in the screening. And that's something that we polished in the last couple of days in the edit, just trying to leave only the best bit of the humor in there.

Oscar after a long night.

That worked so well, without those lighter moments the film could have felt too heavy or too tragic. It needed that energetic release every now and then.

Yeah, that is quite important because otherwise the film would just fall into a tragedy. And Simón was very adamant that he didn't want this to go in that direction. He really wanted the humor to help to bring this relief to the story. So I think the film is kind of now called like a ‘tragic comedy’. And I think that's probably a good way of describing it.

At what point did you use Louper on this project?

I was in Colombia with Simón editing for six weeks and then I had to leave and come back to London, but we didn't have a final cut yet. When I arrived in London, he called me and said, “we need to finish the film!” It had been accepted into Cannes and we only had a couple of days to do final tweaks. There was no time for him to come to London or for me to go back to Colombia. And I said “I know just the right tool.”

So we used Louper to do the final tweaks and watch sequences and just finesse the cutting towards the end. It allowed us to connect and feel pretty much as if we were in the same room together. And it's so problem-free, it's easy to use and it works really well. Sometimes he would log off and I would do things on my own and then he would come back in, I would show him where we were, exactly like we were doing in the room in Colombia. And that was really good.

For me especially it's a godsend because I'm based in London but I tend to work with directors that are not UK-based. Having Louper allows me to edit remotely, it just opens up possibilities to explore more things and we don’t have to be tied to a specific schedule and a specific way of working anymore.

The trailer to 'Un Poeta'.

Can you talk about being at the Cannes Film Festival, and what it was like watching the film with an audience?

To be in this festival with so many great films and filmmakers, and to win a Jury award, that was incredible. But I think the most magical moment for me was actually the premiere of the film – just seeing the reaction of the audience. And it was just incredible. They were enjoying the film all the way through. At the end, when the title of the film appears, the clapping was super intense and you could feel that people were really happy with what they had seen. This is a really good thing to feel, after you’ve spent a lot of time working on something.

It makes it all worthwhile, all the hard work. That's why you do it, right? It's for an audience.

Absolutely, it's so nice to see that the film is being well received and it's getting distribution in quite a few countries. I feel like indie cinema, arthouse cinema, is having a hard time trying to find a place – of course we have streaming platforms – but in theatrical release it's getting harder and harder to get space for those kinds of films. So it's good to see that this film is succeeding and it’s being well received. Now let’s see how it plays in cinemas!

Producer Katharina Bergfeld, DOP Juan Sarmiento Grisales, Actor Ubeimar Rios Gómez, Director Simón Mesa Soto, Producer Manuel Ruiz Montealegre and Editor Ricardo Saraiva at the Cannes Film Festival 2025.

Ricardo Saraiva is an editor, based in London.

Check out his site to view more of his work.

Un Poeta premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2025, winning the Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard category.

Un Poeta was directed by Simón Mesa Soto and edited by Ricardo Saraiva BFE. The director of photography was Juan Sarmiento Grisales, with sound by Ted Krotkiewski. Cast include as Oscar and Rebeca Andrade as Yurlady. Production by Ocúltimo, Ma.ja.de, Momento Film, Medio de Contencion Producciones.

Ricardo edits on Avid Media Composer, using Louper to stream his remote edit sessions.

Visit our setup guides for detailed instructions on how to set up your stream for live remote edit sessions.