I am 50 years old, and while I consider myself a citizen of the world, my heart and education belong below the Equator. From this perspective and as a professional filmmaker, I have seen South American cinema struggle to find a way of telling stories that combine the poetic elements of our culture with our social and political background. For three and a half decades, we have lived with the phenomenon of Communism, in certain years with enthusiasm and in other years with disillusionment; more recently, we have seen the disintegration of the situation in Cuba. But we have never been able to create a film that represents our reality as fully as Julian Schnabel now has in Before Night Falls.
I believe Before Night Falls is an emblematic portrait of the world below the Equator. It is a strong, poetic and imaginative piece of work; a beautiful parable that begins in a place of extreme poverty and ends in a place of extreme wealth. It has far more than one reading; perhaps most important, Before Night Falls is a portrait of the artist as a free man. It's very difficult to make movies about artists; I believe Julian has succeeded because he always considers the humanity of the character more than the plot of the story. He also has an extraordinarily poetic vision in terms of how he sees the background and how he inserts the character into the landscape. Mr. Schnabel has invented his own cinematic vocabulary with this movie.
Before Night Falls epitomizes freedom of expression both in its form and its content. What is so interesting to me is that a Jew who lives in New York - a man who is almost the paradigm of the "successful artist," and not a guy who grew up in Colombia or Brazil or Havana - arrives and tells us the story we were never able to tell. Julian Schnabel has created the best Latin American movie ever made about the subject of freedom.
-- Brazil, November, 2000
