We look back at the decades-long filmmaking journey of acclaimed American documentarian Ross McElwee, ahead of the release of his latest film, Remake (2025).
Born in Charlotte, North Carolina, Ross McElwee is an acclaimed documentary filmmaker and cinematographer, known for his frequently funny and self-deprecating autobiographical films. Often interweaving episodic journeys with personal narratives, his work explores life’s big questions: love, family, and mortality. McElwee’s films veer away from the purely observational direct cinema of the 1960s. Instead, he plays an engaged and at times intrusive role in the unfolding action.
After a 14-year break, McElwee returned to filmmaking with Remake (2025), a deeply personal and heart-breaking meditation on image-making in the wake of the tragic passing of his son, Adrian, who often appeared in his films. Ahead of Remake’s release at DocHouse, we look back at McElwee’s unique filmmaking journey.
Sherman’s March / 1986 / 157 mins
Armed with a 16mm camera and a grant to make a documentary about the aftermath of William Tecumseh Sherman’s 1864 march to the sea, Ross McElwee gets sidetracked.
After his girlfriend breaks up with him, McElwee shifts his attention from the historical to the personal, to the battlefield of modern love, embarking on a sociological chronicle that documents the courting rites and rituals of the New South.
A generous and humanistic portrait of several remarkable women that Ross meets along the way, Sherman’s March is a landmark of first-person filmmaking that presaged everything from Michael Moore to reality TV.
Now restored in beautiful 4K, Sherman’s March screens from 13 September. Book tickets here.
While Sherman’s March looks forward, Remake is McElwee’s look back, at age 78, at a life that has been disrupted by tragedy. These two masterpieces, separated by four decades, prove that McElwee is one of our essential filmmakers.
- Screen Slate
Time Indefinite / 1993 / 117 mins
Time Indefinite finds McElwee grappling with questions of regeneration, human existence, and the finiteness of the body. “Everything begins and ends with family,” he observes at the film’s close, after confronting both death and new life: the deaths of his father and grandmother, and the birth of his son, Adrian.
Shaken by this sudden succession of loss, McElwee falls into a depression. He seeks solace first in his friend and former high-school poetry teacher, Charleen, the subject of his first film, and later in his brother, a doctor. Through a series of conversations, he reflects on his morbid preoccupation with death and searches for a way to shake it off.
The Mark Twain of documentarians... McElwee’s wit is surpassed only by his uncanny knack for observation.
- Slant Magazine
Six O’Clock News / 1996 / 103 mins
The final image of Time Indefinite connects directly to the opening of Six O’Clock News. After becoming a father, McElwee spends considerably more time at home, watching the daily tragedies of the outside world unfold on television. The vulnerability of his newborn son, Adrian, is thus juxtaposed with the harsh brutality of the world beyond the home.
In Six O’Clock News, McElwee attempts to move beyond the anonymous figures on the TV screen – the victims of earthquakes, disease, and murder – by travelling from town to town and filming these human-interest stories over the course of several years.
Photographic Memory / 2011 / 87 mins
In Photographic Memory, McElwee once again turns the camera towards his own family, reflecting on the difficulties of understanding his son, Adrian, as he grows older. Concerned by the increasing distance between them, McElwee travels to Brittany, France, to revisit the places and people he encountered while working there 38 years ago.
Through photographs, films and memories from this earlier period of his life, he attempts to reconstruct a past that his son never experienced. As McElwee retraces his own past, the film becomes an attempt to understand not only who his son is becoming, but also the father he himself has been.
Remake / 2025 / 117 mins
In Remake, McElwee turns his lens on the passage of time and the uneasy space between documenting life and understanding it.
The film traces McElwee’s relationship with his son Adrian, and the fragile bond the camera created between them while Adrian was alive, and now that he’s gone. Drawing from decades of footage, some shot by Ross, some by Adrian, the film becomes a layered excavation of memory and image-making.
Threaded through is the ghost of another project: a stalled effort by Hollywood to fictionalise Sherman’s March. What emerges is a powerful and moving work shaped by absence and propelled forward by a father’s love for his son.
Remake screens at Bertha DocHouse from 25 September. Book tickets here.