Artist Julian Schnabel's second feature film is an ambitious portrait of Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, who spent his last years in exile in New York in the 1980s. Like Schnabel's stylish reflection on painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, Before Night Falls attempts to capture not only the arc of an artistic career but the extreme personal costs of a life lived outside the mainstream. As an artist, an intellectual, and a homosexual, Arenas was subject to persecution and censorship, which forced him to smuggle the manuscripts of his short stories, poems, and novels out of Cuba to be published abroad. In bringing Arenas's life to the screen, Schnabel was guided by the writer's own powerful autobiographical manifesto, published posthumously. The resulting film has already earned major prizes at the Venice Film Festival, honoring both the production and an extraordinary performance by Spanish actor Javier Bardem.