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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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Samba: The Ancestral Heartbeat of Brazil
An evolving journey through memory, music, race, faith, and Carnival, told by the voices of the men and women who shaped the story of samba in Samba on Your Feet.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Jun 137 min read
The Origins and Evolution of Samba and Carnival in Brazil
Samba on your Feet is a film by Eduardo Montes-Bradley | To experience samba and Carnaval is to immerse oneself in a living history.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Jun 135 min read
Héctor Tizón: The Journey as Destiny
A documentary portrait of Argentine novelist Héctor Tizón, filmed entirely in the province of Jujuy, exploring migration, cultural memory, language, and the mythic power of the journey in Northern Argentine literature.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Jun 118 min read
Andrés Waissman — Painter of Multitudes.
Waissman (2010), directed by Eduardo Montes-Bradley for Heritage Film Project, offers an extended portrait of the Argentine artist Andrés Waissman at work in his Palermo studio. The film traces the origins of his Multitudes series — figures of nomadism, immigration, and silent crowds — and the multicultural ancestry behind his most recognized body of work.
Heritage Film Project
Jun 104 min read
Luis Harss: The Image of Movement
By gathering certain authors, by placing them in relation to one another, Harss helps make them visible as a group. And in doing so, inevitably, he leaves others out. To what extent do literary movements exist before they are named — and to what extent are they the result of critical operations like his?
Pilar Roca Escalante
Jun 45 min read
Los Cuentos del Timonel (2001): Osvaldo Bayer en sus propias palabras. Un film de Eduardo Montes-Bradley.
Los Cuentos del Timonel es el retrato documental que Eduardo Montes-Bradley filmó en Berlín sobre Osvaldo Bayer — historiador, periodista y anarquista argentino, autor de La Patagonia Trágica — ganador del Cóndor de Plata al Mejor Documental 2002 otorgado por la Asociación de Cronistas Cinematográficos de la Argentina.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Jun 33 min read
Pérez Celis: La Pintura como Destino.
Pérez Celis es el retrato documental que Eduardo Montes-Bradley filmó en 2005 en el atelier de Little Haiti, Miami, sobre el pintor argentino Pérez Celis — uno de los grandes exponentes del arte latinoamericano del siglo XX. Un film sobre la creación, la motivación y la filosofía del acto de pintar.
Heritage Film Project
Jun 17 min read
Flashback Review on Soriano by Montes-Bradley
In April 1999, Argentina's Clarín gave Eduardo Montes-Bradley's documentary Soriano a full-page review in its prestigious Cultura y Nación section. Critic Jorge Carnevale called it "a revealing film" — a verdict that, twenty-seven years later, still holds.
Heritage Film Project
May 302 min read
The Art of Illuminating Wha's No Longer There
In 1984 Enrique Shore was the photographer of Argentina's CONADEP, walking through the cells and torture chambers to make the images that became evidence against the juntas. Four decades on, he photographs birds in flight. A tribute to a master of capturing what escapes.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 293 min read
La Revolución contra sí misma
Volví a ver Adelante Cubanos, la película de 1959, y descubrí que no era un retrato del fin de la República. Era el comienzo de la Revolución hablándose a sí misma, antes de saber lo que iba a hacer.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 263 min read
Giacomo Puccini came from a family that fortune consistently favored. His younger brother Michele was the one exception — he crossed to South America first, fell to yellow fever, and never came home.
Giacomo Puccini’s younger brother Michele died unknown in Rio in 1891, after a duel and a flight from Jujuy. The warning that kept Giacomo in Italy reached me through Héctor Tizón — a Jujuy judge — in a film I directed twenty-five years ago.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 252 min read
Notes from the The Lost Republic
A find from the research desk of The Lost Republic: a Havana inventory listing a Thorvaldsen, a Wappers, a Columbus given by Columbus's own heir — and what these works tell us about the artistic world into which the Cuban Republic was born.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 234 min read
Soriano: el documental que el tiempo convirtió en un archivo de voces
Durante años me preguntaron dónde se podía ver. Hoy vuelve, completa, mi primer documental sobre un escritor: Soriano, el retrato del Gordo que la academia desdeñó y los lectores amaron. Una película que el tiempo convirtió en el archivo de toda una generación.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 224 min read
Edouard Manet, and the Foreign Eye on Imperial Brazil
Before Brazil painted itself, the world saw it through other people's hands. Debret's three folios, a sixteen-year-old Manet on a school ship, and the foreign eye on imperial Rio.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 224 min read
Che Guevara Believed North Korea Was a Model for Cuba to Follow
A photograph from a drawer at the Cuban Heritage Collection raises a question the iconography has spent sixty years avoiding. In December 1960, Ernesto Guevara sat with Kim Il Sung in Pyongyang and called his regime a model.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 204 min read
Cuba: What the Republic Promised and the Revolution failed to Delivered
I went back to watch Adelante Cubanos, the 1959 film, and realized it was not a portrait of the Republic's end. It was the Revolution speaking to itself in its first months, before it knew what it was going to do.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 194 min read
The Manifiesto Herrán. Un filme documental de Norberto "Negro" Ramírez.
Manifiesto Herrán es el retrato documental de Teresa "Cuqui" Leonardi Herrán — poeta, docente y militante feminista de Salta, Argentina — construido a partir de los testimonios de su hijo Martín, sus compañeras intelectuales y sus amigos más cercanos. Un film sobre la coherencia como forma de vida, la poesía como acto político y el amor como fuerza revolucionaria.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 195 min read
Note from Cuban poet José Kozer on a Documentary Film about Alice Parker
A walk through the archives at the Cuban Heritage Collection with Gladys Gómez-Rossie, the sight of José Kozer's name on a shelf, and the letter the great Cuban poet once sent on the Alice Parker documentary — recovered hours later from my own correspondence.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 145 min read
Modern Cuban Painters, Revisited
A Tuesday afternoon between meetings at the Frost Art Museum at FIU, where Modern Cuban Painters from Havana to New York: Revisited returns the landmark 1944 MoMA exhibition to American walls eighty-two years later.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 143 min read
The Lens, Not the Library. A conversation, and an old quarrel with Borges
Rabbi Mario Rojzman and I discussed how the Torah functions not as a container of all stories, but as a master lens through which we can read every human encounter, across all cultures.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 122 min read
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