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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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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


One Hundred and Eighty Years of Waiting. Now History Has Been Made.
From George Frederick Bristow to Bad Bunny to Dudamel — American music was never forged. It was always being molded. A meditation on the NYT's story of the week.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 254 min read


Biography of a Mimeograph
Pilar Roca on João de Lira Cavalcante Neto — the Fortaleza journalist who left the newsroom to become one of Brazil's most read biographers, the writer of the definitive lives of Getúlio Vargas, Padre Cícero, and Maysa, for whom history is never finished.
Pilar Roca Escalante
May 2514 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


I've Seen This Movie Before
This morning Joseph Horowitz sent me an article in The New York Times about who actually does a dictatorship's dirty work — not fanatics, but the mediocre and the passed-over. I have already seen this movie. I filmed its first act, on Super 8, in the streets of Buenos Aires in 1974.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 235 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


Una Cierta Mirada: Juan José Sebreli y el retrato de Buenos Aires en el siglo XX
Una Cierta Mirada es el retrato documental que Eduardo Montes-Bradley filmó en 2004 sobre Juan José Sebreli — sociólogo, ensayista y filósofo argentino — recorriendo los paisajes urbanos, arquitectónicos e intelectuales de Buenos Aires que definieron su vida y su pensamiento. Un film sobre la ciudad como destino y el siglo XX argentino como experiencia vivida.
Heritage Film Project
May 216 min read
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