Since 1972, director and producer Anthony “Tony” Buba has been producing documentaries in long and short form. His films have been screened in the Sundance Film Festival, Toronto Film Festival, Berlin Film Festival and more.
And from June 8–12, the long list of work by Buba, an OU alumnus, will be recognized by the Anthology Film Archives, a center for the preservation, study and exhibition of film and video in New York.
“I was really surprised and honored to have this retrospective be made in my honor,” Buba said. “It really inspires me to continue working in my career.”
Titled Tony Buba: The Bard of Braddock, the event explores the filmmaker’s work, which has largely been focused in Braddock, Penn., and the constant issues of poverty, decimation, abandonment and others that have been plaguing the city for the past 50 years.
“One of the most singular and egregiously overlooked filmmakers in the U.S., Tony Buba is a national treasure, the prime representative of the blue-collar, populist, politically-committed yet outrageously entertaining American filmmaking movement that’s largely missing-in-action,” said Jed Rapfogel, the film programmer for the Anthology Film Archives.
The event includes a retrospective of different films, both long and short, that the filmmaker has made in the past few decades, including Lightning Over Braddock, No Pets, Struggles in Steel: A Story of African-American Steel Workers, and Voices of Steeltown.
Additionally, a screening of George A. Romero’s Martin, which Buba was working in the sound department for, and The Braddock Chronicles, which will showcase a number of different documentary shorts that Buba has worked on for the past few decades, will also be shown.
John Mhiripiri, the director of the Anthology Film Archives, said he believes this event will explore an underappreciated voice of change in documentary filmmaking for the past few decades.
“(We are) overjoyed to host Buba for this long-overdue retrospective, highlighting a body of work that really has no parallel in the U.S.,” he said.
Under his production company Braddock Films, which he has used to distribute his documentaries since 1974, Buba will continue to work on documentaries for the next couple of years. Among his upcoming projects are We Are Alive, which chronicles the past two years of protests in Braddock, and another film he has been making for the past few years about his family history in Italy.
Additionally, he will continue working on smaller documentary projects that he will likely be releasing via YouTube.
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