The Rest I Make Up

“It’s more than the portrait of an artist (or even of two); it’s a revelation and exaltation of the artistic essence, of the very nature of an artist’s life as an unending act of creation in itself.” – Richard Brody, The New Yorker

The visionary Cuban-American dramatist and educator María Irene Fornés spent her career constructing astonishing worlds onstage and teaching countless students how to connect with their imaginations. When she gradually stops writing due to dementia, an unexpected friendship with filmmaker Michelle Memran reignites her spontaneous creative spirit and triggers a decade-long collaboration that picks up where the pen left off. The duo travels from New York to Havana, Miami to Seattle, exploring the playwright’ s remembered past and their shared present. Luminaries such as Edward Albee, Ellen Stewart, Lanford Wilson and others weigh in on Fornes’s important contributions. What began as an accidental collaboration becomes a story of love, creativity, and connection that persists even in the face of forgetting.

Director/producer Michelle Merman and producer Heather Winters will attend the Opening Night Reception, introducing the film and doing Q&As with the audience throughout the holiday weekend. Opening Night Reception starts at 7:00 pm followed by the screening at 8:00 pm. Light fare and drinks will be provided, courtesy of Morton's The Steakhouse.

For reasons as varied as the differences between them, three major Cuban literary figures left the island where they were born and - without losing their identities - made an indelible imprint on the world at large. What the three documentary portraits that comprise this series have in common is the devotion of the filmmakers to rescue from oblivion and celebrate the spirit of these artists, to ensure that their memory will outlive us all.

Check out the rest of our The Roads of Exile program!