Before Night Falls

Episodic look at the life of Cuban poet and novelist, Reinaldo Arenas (1943-1990

The story is bitter, difficult, and powerful as it portrays the fact that an artist is always dangerous to dictatorships of any kind. The artist struggles to create beauty, while tyranny always seeks to either control or destroy beauty. We follow the fight of a man who used art and his own sexuality as a weapon to undermine bigotry and oppression. Whether in the prisons created by Marxism in Cuba or by capitalism in the United States, this is a man who existed on the edge of society. His is the battle of anyone who thinks for himself or herself in the face of the blank mass face of "normal" society.

The film is a bit disjointed, but I presume that is intentional to depict the strange world in which the Cuban poet lives. It is the same strange place we all live.