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Documentary Film Fund and Heritage film Project at the Marché du Film, Cannes Film Festival, 2026
Four documentary films produced by Heritage Film Project will be represented at the Marché du Film at the Cannes Film Festival by Paris-based sales agency C & Co, marking an important step in expanding the international reach of American arts documentaries.
Apr 172 min read
Paul Chaleff at SWPK Gallery in New York — Solidity and Assemblage April 29 – June 13, 2026
Some artists you encounter once and never stop thinking about. Paul Chaleff is one of those. I first came to know Paul's work while making The Art of Joy Brown — a film in which he appeared as a fellow artist and a genuine voice on the relationship between sculpture, material, and meaning. His presence in that project was characteristic of everything I have come to associate with him: considered, unhurried, rooted in a depth of practice that takes decades to build. Paul Cha
Apr 152 min read
Black History — The Umbilical Cord: What Brazil and Cuba Kept That America Lost
A filmmaker's meditation on the African diaspora across Brazil, Cuba, and the United States — beginning in a restaurant in California in the early 1980s and arriving, decades later, at the Bay of Guanabara, where historian Haroldo Costa offered the sentence that changed everything: We did not cut the umbilical cord. The first in a series of essays exploring Black History not as a month but as a living, continuous thread.
Apr 156 min read
Give me Water or Give me Death! Drinking too much water Can Kill You and Makes You Look Silly.
On the Lawn at the University of Virginia, the architecture is Jefferson's and the accessories are Stanley's. Every crossing figure carries a forty-ounce stainless-steel tumbler as if crossing an interior desert. The question that interests me is not whether this is absurd — that much is obvious — but how carrying water became central to the American identity. The origin is a single sentence, misread for eighty years. A 1945 nutritional recommendation, stripped of its qualify
Apr 148 min read
From the Shores of Tripoli: What a Forgotten War Can Teach Us About the Strait of Hormuz — The Argument Nobody Is Making
There is a painting in the Art Institute of Chicago that almost no one stops to look at. Thomas Birch painted it sometime between 1806 and 1812, and he called it Capture of the Tripoli by the Enterprise. It commemorates a war that has been almost entirely forgotten — which is a pity, because that war contains the most important argument the United States ever made about the freedom of the seas. And that argument is more urgently relevant today than it has been in two centurie
Apr 144 min read
Northeast Brazil. In times that feel increasingly dense, these images carry something lighter—something closer to the human pulse.
Twelve photographs from the northeastern sertão of Brazil — Paraíba and Pernambuco, 2018. Taken by documentary filmmaker Eduardo Montes-Bradley during a journey in search of the region's living musical traditions: forró, birimbau, cavaquinho, samba de roda. A meditation on the gaze, the road, and the faces that stay with you long after the names are gone.
Apr 132 min read
Andante: A Musician's Footsteps — The Life and Work of Alberto Soriano.
Review: Andante: Los pasos de un músico. Vida y obra de Alberto Soriano. By Mireya Soriano Editorial Milenio. Spain, 2021.
Apr 124 min read
Jota Urondo, un cocinero impertinente. A Film by Mariana Erijimovich and Juan Villegas.
Aged beef. Kimchi. Gnocchi with chitterlings. The menu at Urondo Bar does not court trends, nor does it apologize for its stubbornness. It simply is — rooted, specific, unapologetically itself. And that, it turns out, is a political act.
Apr 122 min read
The Lakota Music Project: A Circle Big Enough for Reconciliation
The Lakota Music Project — a collaboration between the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra and Lakota and Dakota musicians that is unlike anything else in American cultural life. This is not a guest-spot model, where an indigenous artist appears on stage for a movement and then disappears.
Apr 114 min read
Michael Slon: Twenty-Five Years Celebration. Old Cabell Hall, University of Virginia
The evening was organized around the idea of America — its founding ideals, its contradictions, its music — and it unfolded with the kind of architectural clarity that only a conductor of long experience can bring to a program. Slon has spent a quarter century building something at UVA that is difficult to name and easy to feel: a choral culture in which students sing not just with technical accomplishment but with genuine understanding of what the music means and where it co
Apr 112 min read
The Founding Father of American Symphony Nobody Ordered
Douglas Shadle’s recent essay in the New York Times, “It Wasn’t Easy Being a Founding Father of the American Symphony,” presents itself as an act of historical recovery. But the logic of the argument does not hold. And once you begin to trace where it fails, a different picture emerges — one in which the desire to find American origins has led to a fundamental misreading of who Bristow was and what his work actually represents.
Apr 914 min read
Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn Come Alive in a New Production Off-Broadway.
Fanny: A Fantasy in G, Tim McGillicuddy’s new play presented by Off-Brand Opera at the Gural Theatre at A.R.T./New York, tells the story of Fanny Mendelssohn — composer, woman, Jew, sister of Felix — and her lifelong struggle to claim her voice in a world not yet prepared to welcome it. McGillicuddy neither sensationalizes nor reaches for false modern parallels. He simply shows what happened, in a parlor, at a piano, over the course of a life. That discipline is the play’s gr
Apr 87 min read
Vision of Spain: In Documentary Mode. With Soriano, Montes-Bradley and Villalobos in the Rearview Mirror.
There is a room in the Hispanic Society of America, a museum so quietly extraordinary that even most New Yorkers have never set foot in it — where the walls tell a different story of Spain. Fourteen monumental canvases, each between twelve and fourteen feet tall, wrapping around you for nearly two hundred and thirty feet of painted Spain.
Apr 27 min read
Leon Botstein: On America, Identity, and the Music Nobody Plays
The documentary filmmaker patiently waited for months until the fog of the Epstein's files dissipated to grab an opportunity to seat next to Leon Botstein to discuss what matters to his film on George Bristow. Now, al last, Leon Botstein perspective is part of Live and Music in the Age of Bristow, Montes-Bradley's documentary on 19th Century Music in America.
Apr 114 min read
Sayonara Mister Bristow: Not enough room in the Pantheon for all American composers. The paradox of Natural Selection and Memory.
I intended to make a biography. The working title was simply George Bristow, and the plan was straightforward: rescue a forgotten American composer from the obscurity into which history had carelessly dropped him, and let audiences discover what they had been missing.
Mar 284 min read
Instruments of a Nation: A Timely Exhibition
Of Thee I Sing traces the country's musical identity through the instruments that shaped it — from Native American traditions and the colonial period through the waves of immigrant innovation that defined the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Mar 272 min read
Ana María Shua y los orígenes de un proyecto continental
A partir de una carta escrita por Ana María Shua en 2002 en apoyo al proyecto Perfiles, este ensayo recorre el origen de una iniciativa que, con el tiempo, se expandió hasta convertirse en un cuerpo de obra documental de alcance continental. Desde Argentina hacia las Américas, el Heritage Film Project explora la memoria cultural a través de artistas, escritores y creadores cuyas historias revelan los vínculos profundos entre identidad, migración y creación.
Mar 254 min read
Carlos María Ocantos: How the Gay Argentine Writer Was Erased from Literary History
This research provides the first comprehensive documentation of systematic homophobic erasure in early 20th-century Latin American letters. Using diplomatic archives, the study reveals how Carlos María Ocantos (1860-1949), despite publishing 37 volumes and earning Royal Spanish Academy recognition, was deliberately excluded from Argentine literary canon due to his sexuality."
Mar 2410 min read
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