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THE JOURNAL
A DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKER'S BLOG
NEW YORK CHARLOTTESVILLE VALENCIA

FEATURE ESSAY
The numbers do not fully absorb. As of this writing, 1,783 cultural heritage sites have been damaged or destroyed in Ukraine since February 24, 2022. Among them, 46 have been completely erased. The Ministry of Culture counts 346 artists and 132 media workers dead. PEN Ukraine had already reached 102 cultural figures killed by the end of 2024, and the count has not stopped. These are not collateral casualties. They are the point.
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Lighter Than Air: A Lecture in Barcelona
On July 21, 2026, Eduardo Montes-Bradley delivers a lecture at the Consulate General of Argentina in Barcelona marking the 110th anniversary of the first crossing of the Andes by hydrogen balloon, achieved in 1916 by Eduardo Bradley and Ángel María Zuloaga.

Eduardo Montes-Bradley
2 days ago2 min read


Searching for Joaquín Rodrigo in Valencia
A drive down the Mediterranean coast to Cullera, and a meeting with Cecilia Rodrigo, daughter of Joaquín Rodrigo — the blind composer who wrote every note of his life's work in Braille. A house of seven-step staircases, a family workshop, and the foundation that gathered a scattered archive under one roof.

Eduardo Montes-Bradley
3 days ago3 min read


City of Memory, City of Forgetting: Valencia in Layers
Nanjing accumulated its past, layer upon layer. Valencia did something stranger — it kept some layers and erased others. Reading a city through what remains, and what was made to disappear.

Eduardo Montes-Bradley
7 days ago4 min read


The River That Became a Garden
A flood nearly killed a city. What grew from the wound is a lesson in what citizens can demand from the places they live.

Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Jul 134 min read


Coming Home: "The Piccirilli Factor" Premieres in Massa
Eduardo Montes-Bradley's documentary The Piccirilli Factor: Italian Sculptors and the City Beautiful Movement will have its European premiere on August 4, 2026, in the gardens of Villa Rinchiostra in Massa, Italy — birthplace of the Piccirilli brothers, the carvers behind the Lincoln Memorial and America's most iconic monuments. Organized by the Comune di Massa and the Biblioteca Civica Stefano Giampaoli.

Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Jul 132 min read


Cuando el concepto no alcanza, se impone la metáfora
El correo como sistema puede explicarse con organigramas, flujos, ventanillas, camiones, carteros, sellos, horarios y reglamentos. Pero una carta tiene otra cosa: tiene alguien que la escribe, alguien que la espera, una demora, una pérdida posible, una ansiedad, una llegada. Tiene mundo. Tiene alma. Tiene vida.

Guille Mealla
Jul 73 min read


Tiffany: Beyond the Gilded Age
The Untold Story of Louis Comfort Tiffany's Global Artistic Empire and How America's Master of Light Became the World's First Global Design Ambassador

Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Jul 710 min read


Chronicle of a Summer: A Film That Still Has Something to Teach Us
I recently rewatched Chronicle of a Summer, Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin's 1961 film, for the first time in nearly fifty years. I must have first seen it as a young teenager. The strange thing this time around was the math: this film was shot in the summer of 1960 — basically the moment I was born. Watching it again, I found myself looking less at "subjects" in a sociological experiment and more at my own parents' generation, caught on camera at exactly the age they would have

Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Jul 65 min read


Nothing Is Ever Enough
Notes on "Papá Iván," a film by María Inés Roqué. México, 2000. Argentina's Dirty Little War This morning I spent the better part of an hour on the phone with a woman I had never met, talking about things I have carried for fifty years. Her name is María Inés Roqué. She makes documentary films; so do I. She left Argentina around the time I did. Somewhere in that hour we discovered we have many friends in common. It should not have surprised either of us: the country we left

Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Jul 411 min read


Completing the Storyboard: Crossing The Andes on a Hydrogen Balloon.
While preparing a lecture in Barcelona on the 1916 crossing of the Andes by hydrogen balloon, I reopened the research archive my father left behind for his book Más liviano que el aire. Among the papers was an incomplete collection of the 1969 La Nación comic series Bradley y Zuloaga, published during the days surrounding the Apollo 11 Moon landing.

Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Jul 33 min read


Arte Brasileiro: Marcelo Soares
Pilar Roca Escalante visita o ateliê de Marcelo Soares em Timbaúba e traça o retrato do xilogravurista e cordelista de Olinda, herdeiro do "poeta-repórter" José Soares. Entre rendeiras, violeiros, o pavão misterioso e as vestes do cangaço, suas gravuras transpõem em imagem a música e a alma do Nordeste.

Pilar Roca Escalante
Jul 23 min read


Stepping Into the Light
In the Jim Crow South, Black men and women paid to step into the photographer’s studio and be seen as they chose. The Holsinger Studio Collection holds the record of that quiet defiance.

Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Jun 302 min read


Nude Muse in Bronze from Acapulco.
A modernist bronze of a woman — commissioned by Colonel Frank "Brandy" Brandstetter, founder of Las Brisas — leads back to a Carrara dynasty, to Rodin, and to the one building where Ponzanelli's marble met Tiffany's glass.

Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Jun 265 min read


The Piccirilli Factor Heads to The Fine Arts Film Festival in Los Angeles
The Fine Arts Film Festival, now in its 13th edition, is genuinely about art — how it's made, how artists survive, what drives them. That's not marketing copy; it's what their selection reflects. Ninety films from 31 countries, and the overwhelming majority made by women and people of color. The Piccirilli Brothers were immigrant stone carvers who shaped some of the most iconic monuments in America and were largely forgotten. This feels like the right room for their story.

Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Jun 261 min read


Guillermo Cabrera Infante y Alberto Korda: La Habana, las Mujeres y el Fin del Espejismo Revolucionario
Por primera vez, Miriam Gómez —viuda de Guillermo Cabrera Infante— responde a un artículo sobre la amistad entre Cabrera Infante y Alberto Korda: La Habana, las mujeres y el fin del espejismo revolucionario.

Dante Korda
Jun 257 min read


Order and Resistance: A Meditation on Humberto Calzada
A reflective essay by Eduardo Montes-Bradley examining how Cuban-American painter Humberto Calzada transformed order into an act of resistance. Through the architecture of his home, the precision of his studio, and his paintings of Havana, Calzada preserved memory, identity, and sovereignty in exile.

Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Jun 243 min read


My Father’s Last Photograph
I suspected my father's days were numbered. Not that he would care to discuss the matter. Despite my best efforts, we never talked about it. A few months earlier I gave him a copy of Seneca's Letters on How to Die, hoping it would trigger a conversation. It didn't.

Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Jun 225 min read


Partisan Women in the Jewish Resistance: A Long History of Fighting Back
Jewish women partisans fought, sabotaged, and survived the Holocaust as soldiers, not victims. A reflection on "Every Day the Impossible," narrated by Tovah Feldshuh.

Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Jun 195 min read
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