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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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Who Was Playing the Harmonica at Battle of Iwo Jima.
Legend has it that veterans of the Pacific campaigns remember hearing a harmonica in the dark between landings — but nobody ever knew who was playing it. This documentary is the story of how we found him: William J. Eckert, Marine, Hamburg-born, Iwo Jima veteran, harmonica in his pocket through all of it.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 277 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
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
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
Don Quixote: A Spanglish Version for el barrio
Years ago Ilan Stavans sent me the most sacred sentence in Spanish, rewritten in Spanglish. Moving to Spain now, I still can't decide whether it's desecration or birth. After Bad Bunny's Super Bowl, was Stavans a precursor?
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 206 min read
Why I Stopped Submitting to Small Film Festivals (And What Works Better)
A filmmaker's reckoning with the festival circuit — who finances whom, why public money raised in cinema's name never reaches the maker, and the day the screen became a chamber for amplifying everything but the film. The author is keeping his films, and his right to choose.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 2013 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
J.J. Lankes: Among Poets and Rebels — Robert Frost and Sherwood Anderson
A documentary portrait of American woodcut master Julius John Lankes — filmed by Eduardo Montes-Bradley and Soledad Liendo — tracing a pastoral vision of agrarian America, a lifelong friendship with Robert Frost, and a defiant career undone at last by the Cold War machine it had always refused to serve.
Heritage Film Project
May 189 min read
El cuerpo de la memoria de violinistas negros. Black Fiddlers, un filme de Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Un recorrido por la memoria musical afroamericana y la influencia decisiva de los violinistas negros en las tradiciones del folk y la música popular estadounidense.
Pilar Roca Escalante
May 183 min read
Feminism and the Lebanese Phalange. The Two Battles of Jocelyne Khoueiri
From the demarcation lines of Beirut to the foot of a Pope — Jocelyne Khoueiri’s life passed through two battles, and the truth she chose at the end.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 183 min read
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