Braddock Films

Ghosts of Amistad by Tony Buba is based on Marcus Rediker's The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom (Penguin, 2012). It chronicles a journey to Sierra Leone in 2013 to visit the home villages of the rebels who captured the slave schooner Amistad, to interview elders about local memory of the incident, and to search for the long-lost ruins of Lomboko, the slave trading factory where their cruel transatlantic voyage began. The filmmakers rely on the knowledge of villagers, fishermen, and truck drivers to recover a lost history from below in the struggle against slavery, and to explore the African origins of the heroes of the Amistad incident.

Buba introduces us to a Braddock entrepreneur who has failed at twelve businesses and is busy teaching would-be entrepreneurs self-confidence.

This short tells the story of a cafe where steel workers come to eat.

Tony Buba trains his documentary lens on the washing of his 87-year-old grandmother’s kitchen walls, an annual ritual. While the filmmaker works diligently and mostly out of sight of the camera, his grandmother anchors the piece, recounting stories of her immigration from Italy in the 1940s, her first impressions of the United States, and her endearing love of Braddock.

An account of a 1975 independent truckers strike.

In this film, Buba struggles over whether he should make a film about a food bank, or just use the money to donate food to the bank. In the end, he leaves it up to the viewer.

A compilation of Tony Buba's home movies

A film which uses the device of developing Polaroid camera shots to present the highlights of a family celebration during the birthday of filmmaker Tony Buba.

The film follows a neighborhood guy who has never been quite the same since somersaulting out of the faulty sixth-story window of some shoddy subsidized housing.

A trip inside a Steel Valley workers’ magazine, which looks like raw material for a Bruce Springsteen song.

A portrait of a wiry, engaging street hustler, Sal Carulli, whose cocky patter breaks down at the end of the film, when he visits his father’s grave.

A short documentary about Braddock

A short film featuring images of his grandfather’s just-demolished shoe-repair shop in 1972