THE LOST REPUBLIC
IN DEVELOPMENT​​​​​​​
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HERITAGE FILM PROJECT in association with the DOCUMENTARY FILM FUND presents
THE LOST REPUBLIC by Eduardo Montes-Bradley
a documentary film made possible with the support of the
THE CUBAN HERITAGE COLLECTION and CASA CUBA
Executive Producers Carolina CALZADA and Soledad LIENDO
Written and Directed by Eduardo MONTES-BRADLEY
Advisory Board
Rafael and Marijean Miyar Victor Deupi
Jorge Hernández Mirell Vázquez
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The Lost Republic is told from inside the Palacio Presidencial of Havana, a building designed to narrate a country into being. For fifty-seven years, the young Cuban Republic searched for its own face — in architecture, in painting, in music, in literature. The Palacio is the room in which that search took place. The film follows it. Its frescoes looked backward at the conquest and the wars of independence, choosing what the Republic would remember and what it would forget. Its stained glass, by Tiffany Studios of New York, was installed at the end of a long arc — one that had begun in the colored light of Damascus and Córdoba and traveled to Havana by way of Byzantium and al-Andalus. The half-moon window above the door, the mediopunto, descends from the Islamic qamariyya, carried into Spain from the Umayyad palaces of the Near East and across the Atlantic by Spanish colonial builders. It was in Cuba that the form found its voice: repositioned to filter the brutal tropical sun into something diffuse and painterly, it ceased to be an imported ornament and became an expression of place. The Palacio, designed by Paul Belau and Carlos Maruri, was the inadvertent last station of all these histories. It was not a monument. It was a workshop. While presidents were sworn in and chased out of these rooms, the young Republic was building a culture of unusual density and defining what it meant to be Cuban. Víctor Manuel, Amelia Peláez, Wifredo Lam, and René Portocarrero were laying the cornerstone of Cuban modernism. Ernesto Lecuona, Amadeo Roldán, and Alejandro García Caturla were writing the music for which the island would be known for decades. Nicolás Guillén, Dulce María Loynaz, Lezama Lima, Cabrera Infante, and Alejo Carpentier were honoring Martí's literary tradition, each in his own voice. This is the world the Palacio housed and witnessed — a story that begins with the men who walked these halls, veterans of the manigua who had built a house of marble to prove the war was over, and Cuba was ready to join the concert of nations.
The Tiffany glass at the Palacio is no incidental flourish. It represents the most important collection of Tiffany architectural stained glass surviving anywhere outside the United States. While Tiffany lamps and decorative objects sit in private collections around the world, and a celebrated Tiffany curtain hangs at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, nowhere outside Cuba does Tiffany's architectural glass survive on this scale. And the glass is only the beginning: Tiffany designed for Cuban commissions well beyond the windows — lamps, hardware, decorative elements whose full extent has never been documented. Cuba is a latent reservoir of Tiffany, never systematically studied. That investigation is part of what this film proposes to undertake.
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The film rests on a foundation built by others. In Havana, restorer and scholar Mirell Vázquez has spent years cataloguing, restoring, and preserving the city's stained glass — work that gives the film both scholarly grounding and intimate access. And for more than sixty years, the Cuban exile community has built and kept the archives that make a film like this possible. Their dedication — to scholarship, to memory, to a culture interrupted — is what allows us to construct an honest narrative worthy of passing on. The Lost Republic is, in no small part, a tribute to that work, and to one of the most remarkable diasporas in modern history.
The Lost Republic argues that the Republic was a working culture of unusual density, and that what it built is the ground on which Cuba will be read for generations. The building still stands — through tropical storms and revolutions — ready, at last, to tell the story it has been waiting to tell.