Completing the Storyboard: Crossing The Andes on a Hydrogen Balloon.

Some archives are assembled through institutions. Others are inherited, one folder at a time.

Among the papers my father left me before he died were the research files for Más liviano que el aire, his book on the crossing of the Andes by hydrogen balloon. I had known the archive for years, but only recently, while preparing a lecture I will deliver in Barcelona on the anniversary of the flight, did I return to it with renewed attention. There, alongside photographs, correspondence, and newspaper clippings, lay something that had fascinated me since childhood: the serialized comic Bradley y Zuloaga, published by La Nación in July 1969.

The timing of its publication was extraordinary. As the world waited for Apollo 11 to land on the Moon, Argentine readers opened their newspapers each morning to two parallel adventures. One unfolded nearly 400,000 kilometers away, where Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin prepared to descend onto the lunar surface. The other revisited an equally improbable journey closer to home: Eduardo Bradley and Ángel María Zuloaga crossing the Andes in a hydrogen balloon in 1916.

On July 21, 1969, the day after Armstrong’s first steps on the Moon, La Nación announced the achievement with a banner headline that filled its front page. Inside, however, readers also found another installment of Figuras de Nuestra Tierra: Bradley y Zuloaga, illustrated by Eduardo Miranda. The juxtaposition was remarkable. One story celebrated humanity’s newest frontier; the other reminded readers that half a century earlier, another generation had looked to the sky and attempted the impossible.

For my family, the series carried a more intimate significance. Eduardo Bradley was my father’s great-uncle. His feat was not simply an episode from Argentine aviation history; it was part of our family mythology. My father purchased the newspaper faithfully, clipping and preserving each installment as it appeared. Somehow, over the years, five episodes disappeared. Whether they were misplaced or never saved, the sequence remained frustratingly incomplete.

That absence lingered for decades.

While preparing my Barcelona lecture, I decided it was finally time to complete the collection. I asked my friend and colleague Mariana Erijimovich if she might consult the archives in Buenos Aires. She generously accepted the task. After patiently searching through bound volumes of La Nación, she found the missing installments.

Today, for the first time in more than half a century, the series is complete.

Seeing the pages reunited is a curious experience. Read consecutively, they function almost like a storyboard. Long before I became a filmmaker, someone had already translated Bradley’s adventure into sequential images, carefully pacing suspense, dialogue, and movement from one installment to the next. It is impossible for me not to recognize in those pages the visual grammar of cinema.

That rediscovery has inevitably shaped the lecture I will present in Barcelona. As I explain in its opening, I have suffered from “compulsive documentarism” since I was fourteen: whenever I encounter a story worth telling, I want to tell it, preferably as a film. The crossing of the Andes belongs to another category. This time the story will be shared not through a documentary, but through a public conversation about a remarkable moment in Argentine history, when technological optimism, scientific ingenuity, and a certain disregard for impossible odds converged above the highest mountains in the Americas.

There is another parallel that strikes me now. In July 1969, while the world watched Armstrong descend to the Sea of Tranquility, La Nación invited its readers to remember two men suspended beneath a balloon crossing the Andes more than fifty years earlier. Both stories belonged to different centuries of exploration, yet they shared the same essential impulse: to look beyond the horizon and trust that invention might carry us farther than imagination alone.

My father never managed to complete his collection. Thanks to Mariana Erijimovich’s generosity, I finally have. Sometimes the last missing pages matter as much as the story itself.