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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
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
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
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
A Rooster, Two Musicians, and a Kitchen in Cuba. What Buena Vista Social Club Left Behind
Recorded in the back patio of a home in the barriada de Santa Amalia, municipio of Arroyo, this surviving fragment of the documentary project Son Tres Son captures two musicians, a rooster who refused to stay out of it, and the sounds of a kitchen preparing lunch. The song is Síctera Cubana, written by Carlos Enrique García Fernández, recorded in La Habana in 1994 by Trío Los Titanes. Some recordings capture a performance. This one captured an afternoon.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Apr 281 min read
The Soul of Stained Glass
A stained glass window is a work of art — a dialogue between form, light, and color. Its fragility is comparable to human life, and yet like human beings it is capable of withstanding the assaults of time and oblivion. To preserve this heritage is to recognize where we come from and what road has brought us here.
Mirell Vázquez
Apr 232 min read
El alma de los vitrales
Un vitral es una obra de arte, un diálogo entre la forma, la luz y los colores. Testigo mudo de la historia, su fragilidad es comparable a la vida humana — y como ella, capaz de resistir los embates del tiempo y del olvido. Preservar este patrimonio es reconocer de dónde venimos.
Mirell Vázquez
Apr 192 min read
Understanding Cuba’s History Through Its Stained Glass
The global success of Buena Vista Social Club revealed the extraordinary power of Cuban music to captivate audiences around the world. Yet Cuba's cultural identity extends far beyond its musical traditions. CUBA: Through the Looking Glass seeks to expand that conversation by exploring the island's contributions to the visual and decorative arts, where architecture, craftsmanship, and color play an equally compelling role.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Mar 155 min read
From New York to Havana: Tiffany Studios and the Presidential Palace
An exploratory research project in Cuba focused on identifying and analyzing stained-glass works connected to Tiffany Studios and artists associated with Louis Comfort Tiffany, in collaboration with conservator Mirell Vázquez Montero.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Dec 31, 20252 min read
Ismael Viñas and the Quest for an Argentine National Project
Two decades have passed since the premiere of Testigo del Siglo at the Buenos Aires Independent Film Festival, where the memoirs of Ismael Viñas—a man who shaped Argentina’s intellectual and political landscape—first flickered on screen. Viñas, the founder of Contorno magazine, a collaborator of Arturo Frondizi, and the creator of the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional (MLN), left Argentina in 1976, never to return.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Sep 19, 20255 min read
Tiffany in the Wild: La Habana
Tiffany in the Wild: La Habana is both a search and a testament. A search for what remains, and a testament to what endures despite the passage of time and the weight of history. My hope is to share these rare survivals before they vanish from the living world, to let audiences see and hear Tiffany as I first did — in the wild.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Sep 8, 20253 min read
Reconstructing Havana
In 2009, I created a film about Cuban-American painter Humberto Calzada. What emerged was more than a biographical portrait—it became a meditation on exile, memory, and the quiet power of art to reclaim what was lost.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Jul 3, 20252 min read
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