By Francisco Perez Rivera. Fox News. Saturday, August 26, 2000.
Before Night Falls
Direction: Julian Schnabel
Starring: Javier Bardem, Johnny Depp, Andrea di Stefano, Sebastián Silva, Sean Penn
Writing: Julian Schnabel Gomez Carriles, Cunningham O'Keefe
NEW YORK — The tragic life of Cuban dissident writer Reinaldo Arenas is the subject of an independent film selected for the Venice film festival.
Before Night Falls, based on Arenas' autobiography of the same title, has Hollywood names like Johnny Depp and Sean Penn in a cast led by Spanish star Javier Bardem and Italian actor Andrea di Stefano.
"The film tells the story of Reinaldo's life, his initial optimism and his disillusion with the revolution," said the director, painter Julian Schnabel, whose first film, Basquiat, was released in 1996.
In addition to the Venice festival, which begins Aug. 31, Schnabel said the film would show next month at the Toronto Film Festival and in October at The New York Film Festival.
The movie starts with the writer as an infant, and follows him through moments of triumph — such as when he received an official literary award in Havana for his first novel, Singing In the Well — through long periods of hiding and incarceration after he fell into disgrace for his
second novel, The Ill-Fated Peregrinations of Fray Servando, in the late 1960s.
It follows him through his Mariel boatlift escape to the United States in 1980 and his subsequent life in New York, where he discovered he had contracted AIDS. The movie ends with his suicide in Manhattan in 1990, at age 47.
"I think that Reinaldo was able to turn his suffering into beauty", said Schnabel. In essence, "the movie is about freedom, and speaks for people who have not had a voice. Because of this movie, more people will able to hear Reinaldo's voice."
The book Before Night Falls was published in Spain by Tusquets in 1992; an English translation, by Dolores M. Koch, was published the next year by Viking Penguin and was selected by The New York Times as one of the 13 best new books of 1993.
"I never thought that I'd get the rights," said Schnabel. "But I contacted Reinaldo's agent Tom Colchie in 1997 and he organized a screening of Basquiat for the directors of the Arenas estate." He also called Lazaro Gomez Carriles, the writer's friend and one of his heirs,
who gave the project his blessing.
Schnabel wrote the screenplay with Gomez Carriles and Cunningham O'Keefe, and began filming last August in several Mexican locations that doubled for Cuba. Filming ended in New York in November.
The screenplay uses the book as a framework and complements it with "a compilation of different things in Reinaldo's other writings and information from people who knew him," he added.
"It's an impressionistic view of Reinaldo's life."
The movie includes footage of contemporary Havana, but Schnabel won't say how it was obtained.
Asked how he feels as a filmmaker, he hesitates. "I am not a filmmaker. I have only done one film before," he said. "Or maybe now I am." | 