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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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Tauromaquia para un espectador incómodo
Una reflexión sobre la tauromaquia no como defensa, sino como contradicción: la dificultad de apartar la mirada frente a un rito antiguo que nuestra época intenta dejar atrás.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 173 min read
Running Through Heaven: Visions of Jack Kerouac at the Grolier Club
A visit to the Grolier Club's Kerouac exhibition on its closing day, where the letters outrank the novels and the title turns out to be a pencil mark in Dostoyevsky.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 165 min read
No Jews, No Dogs: The Talmudic Roots of American Freedom
A boy newly arrived in Miami reads a hotel sign on Collins Avenue: No Jews. No Dogs. He is old enough to understand it instantly. Decades later, as Rabbi Ed Farber, he traces that sign — and the values that made it possible, and the values that made it wrong — back to the first chapters of Genesis. A Heritage Film Project documentary.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 1410 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 Piccirilli Factor to Screen at Villa Rinchiostra in Tuscany
Reads as the lede a Wix preview card would show. The phrase "whose marble built much of civic America" is the hook — concrete, immediate, no jargon. The closing — "to the Apuan town from which they sailed" — gives it emotional shape without being florid.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 123 min read
Jorge Luis Borges: Un documental que expone ideas.
A September 2000 clipping from Clarín reviews Harto the Borges and, near the foot of the third column, announces the coming birth of a son named Thomas Benjamín — conceived in Pompeya during the shoot.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 122 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
Totems Without Theology
A walk with Paul Chaleff through the gardens of the Hudson Valley — and a question about what the future will make of sculptures that begin in abstraction, answer to no god, and conduct their argument in a language the documentary is being made to help decipher.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 117 min read
How Paella First Conquered Spain.
How paella became, against his will, the symbol of a Spain that, after 1898, learned to show itself through the image. From Valencia to the Hispanic Society, a visual operation that Sorolla would fix in his panels.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 84 min read
A Law That Returns: Tilaï Restored at Cannes
A law that returns. Idrissa Ouédraogo's Tilaï, winner of the 1990 Grand Prix, returns to Cannes in a 4K restoration commissioned by the Institut français — Cinémathèque Afrique. Salle Buñuel, Wednesday 13 May, 11:30.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 84 min read
Evita: A Balanced Portrait of Argentina's Most Polarizing Figure.
Originally blacklisted in Argentina and now the most widely viewed film in the Heritage Film Project catalogue, Evita (2005) achieved its unusual evenness of tone through a single deliberate choice: the script was written in English rather than Spanish — the director's first screenplay in his second language. A close reading of how that linguistic distance produced the most balanced portrait yet of one of the twentieth century's most polarizing political figures.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 711 min read
Carola Saavedra: Between Berlin and a Place Named Peixoto — A Documentary by Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Carola Saavedra: Between Berlin and a Place Named Peixoto is an award-winning Heritage Film Project production directed by Eduardo Montes-Bradley, part of his ongoing series of documentary essays on contemporary authors.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 59 min read
White: A Season in the Life of John Borden Evans. A documentary by Montes-Bradley. North Garden, Virginia, 2014
In the deep winter of 2014, Heritage Film Project's Eduardo Montes-Bradley spent a season at the North Garden, Virginia farmhouse where the painter John Borden Evans and his wife, designer Beth-Neville Evans, have lived and worked for more than thirty years. White is the portrait that came out of that winter — and the Richmond International Film Festival's Best Documentary of 2015.
Heritage Film Project
May 35 min read
How Alban Berg, With the Complicity of Alma Mahler and a Trusted Friend in Greenwich Village, Made the Journey from Vienna to Buenos Aires.
A 1970 Buenos Aires LP of Alban Berg’s Chamber Concerto leads back to a 1954 Vienna recording session, a Hannover-born conductor Alma Mahler had trusted, and a New Year’s Eve ritual in a Greenwich Village townhouse where two record producers poured molten lead into cold water and read the shapes.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 35 min read
James Monroe's Farm During the Reign of Terror, Cradle of the University of Virginia
James Monroe owned Monroe Hill from 1789 to 1799 — the exact decade of the French Revolution, with most of it spent in Paris during the Reign of Terror. A note on the film, the Jefferson Trust, the absent landlord whose hill became the cradle of the University of Virginia, a rumor of Monroe's face in David's Coronation of Napoleon, and the unmarked grave of his daughter Eliza at Père Lachaise — a few rows from Jim Morrison.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 28 min read
The Saskatchewan Odyssey of the Jewish Diaspora in Canada
A documentary portrait of Romanian Jewish settlers on the Saskatchewan prairie — told through the reflections of Rabbi Tuffs — tracing the flight from persecution, the hardship of sod dwellings, the tragedy of a woman buried near the fence, and the Talmudic warning that no amount of land is worth separating yourself from the community.
Heritage Film Project
May 17 min read
A Curated Catalogue: Documentary Trilogies Now Available for Institutional Programming
A catalogue of documentary films actively curated into programs designed to reach their rightful audience. Four trilogies — on the American Renaissance, Latin American literature, African American history, and three unparalleled women in the arts — now available for institutional programming, with more to come.
Heritage Film Project
May 13 min read
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