The Eternal Night (La noche eterna) by Coco Fusco, co-commissioned in partnership with the Sharjah Art Foundation, premieres at the Sharjah Biennial 15: Thinking Historically in the Present from 7 February to 11 June 2023.

The Eternal Night, a feature-length artist film, tells the story of three Cuban young men that were condemned for their beliefs and their creations. It is about the power of the imagination to transcend circumstance.

The film is based on the true story of Cuban writer and former political prisoner Néstor Díaz de Villegas. In 1974, Díaz de Villegas was sentenced to six years in prison for writing a poem. He was eighteen years old and had already been branded as a political nonconformist. At the time, those Cubans who were considered too intellectual, too enamoured of American popular culture, too effeminate or too attached to their religious faith were marginalised and subject to incarceration and reeducation.