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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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The Piccirilli Factor Returns Home: A European Premiere in Massa
The Piccirilli Factor celebrates its European premiere in Massa, Italy, as the documentary begins an international tour across museums and cultural institutions.
Heritage Film Project
2 days ago3 min read
Universo Montes-Bradley: Conversaciones con Julia Montesoro
Ya está disponible la primera temporada de Universo Montes-Bradley: Conversaciones con Julia Montesoro
Heritage Film Project
Jul 264 min read
Nothing Is Ever Enough
Notes on "Papá Iván," a film by María Inés Roqué. México, 2000. Argentina's Dirty Little War This morning I spent the better part of an hour on the phone with a woman I had never met, talking about things I have carried for fifty years. Her name is María Inés Roqué. She makes documentary films; so do I. She left Argentina around the time I did. Somewhere in that hour we discovered we have many friends in common. It should not have surprised either of us: the country we left
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Jul 411 min read
My Father’s Last Photograph
I suspected my father's days were numbered. Not that he would care to discuss the matter. Despite my best efforts, we never talked about it. A few months earlier I gave him a copy of Seneca's Letters on How to Die, hoping it would trigger a conversation. It didn't.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Jun 225 min read
The Origins and Evolution of Samba and Carnival in Brazil
Samba on your Feet is a film by Eduardo Montes-Bradley | To experience samba and Carnaval is to immerse oneself in a living history.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Jun 135 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
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
Victoria Ocampo: The Visionary Feminist Who Understood Women Better Than She Understood Mussolini
On my desk sits a first edition of Domingos en Hyde Park, published by Ediciones Sur, Buenos Aires, 1936. On the flyleaf, in a confident cursive hand: "A R. E. Montes Bradley, con toda simpatía — Victoria Ocampo." The essay it introduces — La Historia Viva — is one of the most remarkable political documents written by a Latin American intellectual in the twentieth century. It is remarkable not because Ocampo admired Mussolini. Many did. Between 1921 and 1935, Franklin D. Roos
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Apr 1815 min read
Colonel Gray and the World Monuments Fund.
Colonel James A. Gray, the founder of the World Monuments Fund. She described him as a man who solved problems with quiet boldness—the kind who didn't just raise money but took action. In 1965, he founded what became WMF after pursuing ideas that seemed audacious at the time, like stabilizing the Leaning Tower of Pisa. In 1968, he arranged to bring an Easter Island moai to New York's Seagram Building to remind the world what was at stake—heritage, memory, humanity itself.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Oct 6, 20252 min read
Returning to Rita Dove
Fourteen years ago, I made Rita Dove: An American Poet, a biographical film that captured something essential about one of America's most important voices. You can watch the documentary below.
Now, as Rita and I prepare to embark on a new cinematic journey exploring her epic poem Sonata Mulattica, I find myself revisiting that first collaboration—not out of nostalgia, but to understand who we were then, what we captured, and how far we've traveled since.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Oct 4, 20255 min read
In Search of George Bridgetower: A Journey Begins Below Ground
Poet Rita Dove's visit to George Bridgetower's catacombs inspires a new documentary exploring the forgotten violinist who once performed with Beethoven. Poet Rita Dove once descended into a London catacombs to pay respects to George Bridgetower, the brilliant violinist whose collaboration with Beethoven has been largely erased from history. Her pilgrimage, recount
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Sep 29, 20252 min read
1898: Back to the Present
I find myself trapped in 1898, not by choice but by some strange force, as if the year itself were a lucid dream from which I cannot—or perhaps do not wish to—wake. Every path of research leads back to this temporal crossroads, this pivot point where centuries collide in the most unlikely symphony of events.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Sep 20, 20257 min read
Tiffany The Orientalist
On a February evening in 1913, New York’s bohemian elite gathered at Tiffany Studios for one of the most dazzling spectacles the city had ever seen. The New York Times reported breathlessly on the event, describing it as an “Egyptian fête” held in a “riot of color.”
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Sep 14, 20254 min read
Tiffany in the Wild: Living Museum of Light and Memory
Explore Louis Comfort Tiffany’s stained-glass windows in their original settings with Tiffany in the Wild. At Woodlawn Cemetery in New York and other historic sites across the United States and Havana’s Colón Cemetery, Tiffany’s opalescent glass transforms mausoleums into living museums of light and memory. From Woodlawn’s Belmont, Woolworth, and Gould mausoleums to the Lewis Ginter Mausoleum in Richmond, these radiant works reveal the collaboration of architects, sculptors,
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Sep 12, 20256 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
Tiffany: Arlington St. Church, Boston, Massachusetts
Between 1898 and 1933—spanning thirty-five years until Tiffany's death—Arlington Street Church commissioned what would become the largest collection of single-themed Tiffany windows in the world. Sixteen magnificent panels, conceived and executed as a unified narrative, demonstrate what becomes possible when patronage extends beyond individual commissions to embrace a complete artistic vision.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Sep 2, 20256 min read
From Divine Light to Domestic Beauty: The Medieval Media Revolution That Changed Everything
In the 1880s, Louis Comfort Tiffany lokking at this 700-year-old tradition would asked: “What if we could bring this magic into people’s daily lives, and into their homes?” The question lead Tiffany to reimagined the medieval trinity for a new world.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Aug 29, 20256 min read
Beyond Moral Absolutes: Cinema and Historical Memory in Latin America
While The Official Story reduces the experience of state terror to a moral fable with clear heroes and villains, I'm Still Here creates space for the ambiguous, bureaucratic horror that characterized the Brazilian military regime, ultimately providing a more profound engagement with historical memory.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Aug 24, 20257 min read
“The Art of Joy Brown” Selected for Competition at 2025 Mystic Film Festival
“The Art of Joy Brown” Selected for Competition at 2025 Mystic Film Festival.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Jul 30, 20252 min read
Julius John Lankes: Yankee Printmaker in Virginia
Throughout the film, Montes-Bradley weaves personal archival materials, interviews, and on-location filming with understated sensitivity. We see Lankes’s legacy not only through his prints but also through the memories of scholars, collectors, and descendants who help reconstruct the arc of his life—from Buffalo to Europe, from Vermont to Virginia.
Heritage Film Project
Jul 23, 20253 min read
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