A loving portrait of Maria Irene Fornes, one of America’s greatest playwrights and most influential teachers. The visionary Cuban-American dramatist constructed astonishing worlds onstage, writing over 40 plays and winning nine Obie Awards, though many know her only as the ex-lover of writer and social critic Susan Sontag. At the vanguard of the nascent Off-Off Broadway experimental theater movement in NYC, Fornes is often referred to as American theater’s “Mother Avant-Garde.”

Sidelined by dementia, Fornes formed an unexpected friendship with filmmaker Michelle Memran, triggering a decade-long collaboration that reignited her creative spirit. In The Rest I Make Up, Fornes and Memran explore the playwright’s remembered past and their shared present. What began as an accidental collaboration becomes a story of love, creativity, and connection that persists even in the face of forgetting.