Next Friday, September 12th, at 8:30 pm, the Artefactus Cultural Center will present the documentary Espacio: Juan Ramón Jiménez en Miami, directed by Carlos García Pandiello. The screening will feature a presentation by Habey Hechevarría, a theater scholar with a PhD in Hispanic Literature from Florida International University.

The documentary explores the years when Juan Ramón Jiménez, considered the most influential Spanish poet of the 20th century, lived in Miami (1939–1942). After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Jiménez went into exile and found a space in the city where he returned to writing poetry and drawing inspiration from its landscape to create his most important poem, Espacio. Based on the diary of Zenobia Camprubí, the poet’s wife, the work reveals a little-known chapter in Hispanic literary history in the United States, which places Jiménez as one of the pioneers of Spanish-language literature in South Florida. In 1956, the poet was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.