Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 2000 Venice Film Festival, Before Night Falls is a richly imagined journey into the life and writings of the brilliant Cuban author and exile Reinaldo Arenas. Directed and co-written by Julian Schnabel (Basquiat ), the film stars Javier Bardem, whose eloquent, complex performance as Arenas earned him the 2000 Venice Film Festival's Volpi Cup for Best Actor.

Before Night Falls spans the whole of Arenas' life, from his rural childhood and his early embrace of the Revolution to the persecution he would later experience as a writer and homosexual in Castro's Cuba; from his departure from Cuba in the Mariel Harbor exodus of 1980 to his exile and death in the United States. It is a portrait of a man whose search for freedom - artistic, political, sexual - defied poverty, censorship, persecution, exile and death. Like Arenas' work, Before Night Falls combines passages of transporting imagination with urgent realism; in so doing, it embodies the creative e