Eduardo Montes-Bradley | Notes on Myself

I have spent a lifetime searching for answers to questions that have been with me from the beginning.

 

I grew up in Argentina during the turbulent 1970s, in the bosom of a family with multiple cultural legacies and roots stretching from Bessarabia and Berlin to Spain, the Mediterranean and even New England. More than a melting pot, it was a scene that could very well have inspired the cantina in Star Wars. Languages, accents, religions, political convictions, stories of migration and competing versions of the past were simply part of the landscape.

 

​There is an image from those years that has never left me. I must have been nine years old, in my flannel pajamas, peeking through the door into the living room while dancers from the Ballet Folklórico de México kept the neighborhood awake well into the small hours of the morning. Nights like that were not unusual. Poets, painters, composers, dancers and troubadours came through the house, and the conversations seemed endless. From behind that door, without knowing it, I may have been looking at my own life down the road.​

 

A few years later I toyed with the idea of capturing some of that world on Super 8, but circumstances called for restraint in a country slowly fading into chaos. By 1979 I had found a path into cinema in New York, chasing dreams and still looking through the glass.

 

My first serious experience as a filmmaker came much later, writing and directing fiction in Hollywood. It wasn’t my cup of tea. I was still searching for answers; in some ways, I was still wearing those flannel pajamas, peeking through the narrow opening of the door and wondering what was happening in the other room.​

 

Something changed in 1998, when I conceived my first biographical documentary, on the Argentine writer Osvaldo Soriano. I approached his life hoping that his story might help me understand some of my own questions. Instead, I discovered something more useful: a way of asking them. That film opened the door.​What followed has been nearly three decades of documentary essays about writers, artists, musicians, architects, scholars and others whose lives and work offered another opportunity to look through that opening. Taken together, these films now constitute a modest body of work—an oeuvre, if one must use the word—that remains unfinished. I am still searching, still making films, and, fortunately, still finding more questions than answers.