Celebrate National Poetry Month

Join us for a special film series featuring Aimé Césaire: The Mask of Words, Before Night Falls and Dead Poets Society. Launched by the Academy of American Poets in April 1996, National Poetry Month is a special occasion that celebrates poets’ integral role in our culture and that poetry matters. Over the years, it has become the largest literary celebration in the world, with tens of millions of people marking poetry’s important place in our lives.

Aimé Césaire: The Mask of Words

TONIGHT!
Tue. 4/25 at 6:00 pm

Film and conversation followed by a reception on the plaza
FREE for UM students*In 1987, Florida International University hosted a landmark conference called Négritude, Ethnicity, and Afro Cultures in the Americas. This remarkable encounter saw Martinican poet Aimé Césaire and Senegal’s first president Léopold Senghor in conversation about their different yet related explorations of Blackness and poetry.

Guadeloupean filmmaker Sarah Maldoror captured the conference in Aimé Césaire: The Mask of Words. Best known as the director of the Angolan film Sambizinga (1972), Maldoror documented FIU’s Négritude symposium with her own vision and in doing so expanded its thematic, temporal, and geographical terrain to include not only the college campus, but downtown Miami, the Everglades, and Martinique, Césaire’s birthplace. In Aimé Césaire, Miami is a Black capital that connects Haiti, Guadeloupe, and Martinique in Négritude, through Césaire’s poetry, read by fellow poet and author Maya Angelou.

Excerpt from Terri Francis’ Encountering Miami Négritude with Filmmaker Sarah Maldoror (July 19, 1929 − April 13, 2020).
*Free tickets for University of Miami students are available in person at the box office.

Dead Poets Society

Wed. 4/26 at 7:30 pm

Academy Award winner Robin Williams delivers one of his most memorable performances portraying a passionate English teacher who inspires his students to embrace their creativity and seize the day, he clashes with the conservative traditions of an elite prep school and ignites a rebellion that transforms the lives of his students forever.

“This 1989 movie adaptation of N. H. Kleinbaum was a game-changer—it is one of the best and award-winning classic films of the decade.” —Ariane Cruz, Screen Rant
Buy Ticket

Before Night Falls

Thu. 4/27 at 7:30 pm

An episodic look at the life of Reinaldo Arenas, a Cuban poet and novelist, from his childhood in Oriente province to his death in New York City. It follows his rebellious spirit as he joins Castro’s rebels and engages in an on-and-off love-hate relationship with his wealthy early lover, Pepe.

“[Director Julian] Schnabel has fashioned a dense, emotionally satisfying portrait of a man, a time and a place.” –David Rooney, Variety
Buy Ticket