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The Case of Meriwether Lewis
This article is not an argument for restoring the former name or returning the monument. Reasonable people may still disagree about symbols in public space. But we should all agree that history must be based on what we can prove — not on what we “find fair to assume.”
Nov 53 min read


George Frederick Bristow
The following unsigned article appeared in The Choir Leader in December 1898—the very month of George Frederick Bristow’s death. The author could not have known that the composer would pass away only weeks later, and thus the piece stands midway between tribute and obituary. Written in the past tense yet with the expectation of further work to come, it praises Bristow’s integrity, idealism, and devotion to American musical life while lamenting the nation’s failure to recogniz
Oct 306 min read


Desecration of Art in Charlottesville
Charlottesville, a city that once aspired to be a center of learning and culture, now bears the shame of this desecration.
Oct 302 min read


J.J.Lankes: Yankee Printmaker in Virginia
As a documentary filmmaker, I was moved by Lankes’s vision and by his friendship with Robert Frost and Sherwood Anderson. With J.J. Lankes: Yankee Printmaker in Virginia, I aimed to explore how his art and his dialogue with Frost, Anderson and others framed an American understanding of work, place, and purpose.
Oct 275 min read


Jesús Ramón Vera, The Poet Who Sifts Noise
In 2004 I had the privilege of producing a film on Jesús Ramón Vera, a celebrated poet, writer, and devoted comparsero from Salta, Argentina. Vera’s life and work offer a fascinating journey across the cultural frontier of Northwest Argentina, blending high literature with the deep, collective traditions of the Andean highlands.
Oct 263 min read


The Future of Documentary Filmmaking
The Future of Documentary Filmmaking is here, and the opportunity is immense. We can speak across borders, build communities of curiosity, and reimagine how memory and truth circulate. But the work demands a routine, a sustainable practice, and a kind of faith—the same faith composers once needed when creating music that might never be performed.
Oct 242 min read


Field Notes: On Oriental Light
Across painting, music, and the decorative arts, the exotic functioned as a field of projection—a way for Western culture to measure itself against the imagined other. Lévy’s brush, Tiffany’s glass, Bridgetower’s bow: each transformed foreignness into beauty, light, and sound that spoke as much about the Western imagination as about the East it sought to evoke.
Oct 162 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.
Oct 62 min read


The Other Borges: Reflections on Making "Harto The Borges"
When Borges declared 'I'm fed up with him' about his own persona, he didn't imagine it would become my documentary title. 25 years later, 'Harto the Borges' remains relevant—a polyphonic portrait using multiple voices that resist synthesis, mirroring Borges's own literary techniques. My reflections on the methodology and complete transcription now available on Academia.edu to mark the anniversary.
Sep 235 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.
Sep 197 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.
Sep 195 min read


Rita Dove: Finding a Different Way Out
A mysterious letter arrives from Berlin, sent by Albert Imhoff, a blind critic and old friend of the filmmaker's father. Discover his profound analysis of the documentary "Rita Dove: An American Poet," a journey through memory, the "American dream", and the poet's quest to find a "different way out".
Sep 155 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.
Sep 26 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.
Aug 296 min read


Sorolla: Following the Light
Perhaps, we have to stop swimming and let the current take us to safe harbor, or to a sandy beach somewhere. Come to think of it, it was in fact Aronovich who explained to me once how Weinschenk himself used to talk of shades of gray in film as beaches. And here I go again! drifting in free association when I should be getting ready to pick my daughter from school and talk about what we're going to do once we move to Madrid.
Aug 273 min read


The Changing Landscape of Cultural Documentary Filmmaking
The next chapter in our nearly forty-year journey is being written now. If we are to continue thriving in this mission to ensure that art, culture, and social consciousness find their place in our rapidly evolving media landscape, we need a broader audience, international partnerships, and you.
Aug 263 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.
Aug 247 min read


A Tribute to Humberto Calzada
This is my tribute to Humberto Calzada: Cuban, American, painter, friend, brother in all the ways that matter. A man who understood that sometimes the only way to go home is to create it, brush stroke by brush stroke, until the canvas holds everything you remember about love.
Aug 234 min read


MIPCOM ’25: Back in Cannes to Share Our New Films
I’m pleased to announce that I will be in Cannes from October 11 through 17 to represent the Heritage Film Project and share our most recent collection of films—created with your support and the generosity of cultural philanthropists dedicated to bringing the richness of American voices to the international stage.
Aug 141 min read


Moments That Never Make the Screen
here are moments during filming that never make it to the screen—far more of them than one might imagine. I’m not referring to bloopers, those lighthearted clips some reserve for the credits when all is said and done. I mean the other kind—the ones that stay with you, etched in memory.
Jul 221 min read
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