Director, Screenplay
Simón Mesa Soto
He was born in Medellín in 1986. He became known for the short film Leidi with which he won the Palme d'Or at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival. Her next short film, Madre, was also part of the Official Selection at Cannes in 2016, and won numerous awards around the world. Amparo (2021), his first feature film, was the winner of the Stimulus for the Production of Feature Films of the Fund for Cinematographic Development -FDC- in 2017 and selected to participate in the Cannes Critics' Week 2021.
He studied Audiovisual Communication at the University of Antioquia and in 2014 he completed the master’s in film Direction at the London Film School. During his time at the University of Antioquia, he discovered his vocation for cinema. There he made several short films, among them Puta ciudad, presented in the Pandora's Box selection at the Santa Fe de Antioquia Film and Video Festival; and his graduate thesis, the medium-length film Los tiempos muertos, with which he participated in the International In Vitro Visual Festival (now the Bogota Short Film Festival - Bogoshorts), in 2010, and which, according to him, was an exercise in which he discovered that “cinema is a question of characters ”.
Upon graduating from university, he immediately entered teaching, a job that, he says, has served him financially much more than filmmaking. He began teaching editing classes and was later hired as an audiovisual producer for the institutional videos of the University's extension department.
Later, he carried out the Eclipse project in San Joaquín for TeleMedellín, as part of the series 12 looks on the slums of Medellín. After working for a while, he felt that he should continue studying film and planned to do postgraduate studies at the London Film School in England, which he attended thanks to scholarships from Proimágenes Colombia and the Medellín Mayor's Office.
He settled in London for three years, during which time he worked, studied, and made the short films Back Home and Beth. His master's degree project at London Film School was the short film Leidi, with which he obtained the Bogota Cinematheque - IDARTES Creation Grant, and won, in addition to the Palme d'Or, the Golden Hugo at the International Festival of Chicago Film Festival in 2015, in addition to participating in other important festivals such as those of Guanajuato, Vancouver, Melbourne, Havana, Sao Paulo, Palm Springs and the BFI London Film Festival, among others.
Upon returning from London, he taught again, this time in Bogota, at the National Film School, and later returned to Medellín to work as a full professor at the University of Antioquia, teaching the film directing course. He was called by a Swedish production company to make Madre, a short film that won the Grant for the Production of Short Fiction from the Mayor of Medellín, which was selected in the Official Competition of the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, and which won the Hugo Award for Best Short Film in the 2016 Chicago International Film Festival.
In 2017 he founded the production company Ocúltimo, with which he produced his first feature film Amparo, which had the support of Fondo para el Desarrollo Cinematográfica, Svenska Filminstitutet, Doha Film Institute, Magin Comunicaciones, the Medellín Film Commission and the Goethe-Institut from Bogota.
Mesa has also developed ads, institutional, documentaries and music videos. In addition to being a consultant, advisor and jury in contests, festivals, and institutions in the audiovisual area.
Last updated: June 2021