Corrie Film Club is on the third Sunday this month, on September 15th, at 8pm in the village hall.
The film showing is Before Night Falls (Director Julian Schnabel .UK 2000. 133 mins Cert 15).
An impressionistic biopic about the troubled life of the gay Cuban poet and novelist Reynaldo Arenas. Javier Bardem puts in a strong performance in the title role and is supported by Johnny Depp.
Before Night Falls tells the story of Cuban poet and novelist Reinaldo Arenas. Raised in the Oriente Province of Cuba in the 1940s, Arenas began his life-long love of the sea and water. Leaving home as a young adolescent, he moves to Havana where he finds himself swept up in the revolutionary spirit and joins a circle of writers and artists. His first novel, “Singing from the Well,” is published in Cuba, but as Castro’s oppressive regime gathers force, Arenas’ homosexuality and political writing make him a target. After being falsely accused of molestation, Arenas is arrested and imprisoned at El Morro. Eventually released from prison after dehumanizing treatment, Arenas flees Cuba in the 1980 Mariel Harbor boatlift. After moving to New York with his friend Lazaro Gomez Carilles, Arenas’ hopes for a new life are destroyed by AIDS, and he dies in 1993, at the age of 45.
The film is based on the autobiography that Arenas wrote in the years after leaving Cuba following his clashes with the authorities there.
