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It feels profoundly meaningful to reunite with Rita after all these years — to extend the conversation that began in Rita Dove: An American Poet into a new creative horizon. Much has changed since we first filmed together, but the essence remains: a shared belief that art — whether written, sung, or filmed — has the power to make history visible and to make the invisible resonate.

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.

This post draws on recent scholarly analysis of Haydn's employment contracts and Rita Dove's groundbreaking work in "Sonata Mulattica" to explore the intersection of servitude, genius, and race in classical music history.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

We can no longer remain silent in the face of Europe’s rising antisemitism. What once passed as neutrality or cultural critique now emerges as open hostility toward Israel and the Jewish people. To be silent is to be complicit; to speak is to stand against the distortion of history and the legitimization of terror. This declaration affirms my refusal to accept antisemitism in any guise, and my commitment to name it whenever and wherever it appears. -- Eduardo Montes-Bradley

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In our digital age, when so much experience is mediated and virtual, these surviving in-context Tiffany works represent something increasingly rare: authentic encounters with artistic vision as it was originally intended. They exist in the wild not as abandoned artifacts but as continuing participants in American cultural life.

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.