Best-known for his landmark reflexive documentary Sherman’s March, Ross McElwee has crafted his most aching, personal film yet with Remake. Partially structured around McElwee’s process when a company hopes to adapt Sherman’s March, its true nature soon reveals itself: a tribute to the director’s son and self-reckoning as McElwee ponders his hand in his son’s path. It’s a nakedly confessional, deeply emotional work that will break any parent’s heart into a million pieces.
Ahead of a July 10 theatrical release from Music Box Films, the distributor will also unveil a new 4K restoration of his Sundance winner Sherman’s March beginning a week prior, July 3. Ahead of the runs beginning at NYC’s Film Forum, trailers and posters have landed for both releases.
Here’s the synopsis: “In Remake, filmmaker Ross 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 fictionalize McElwee’s 1986 classic, Sherman’s March. What emerges is a work shaped by absence and propelled forward by the urge to keep looking, even when there’s no clear story left to tell.”
See the trailer and poster below.
Here’s the synopsis for Sherman’s March: “Armed with a 16mm camera and a grant to make a documentary about the lingering aftermath of William Tecumseh Sherman’s 1864 march to the sea, Ross McElwee gets sidetracked. After his girlfriend breaks up with him, Ross shifts his attention from the historical to the personal, to the battlefield of modern love, and embarks 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 sketches its characters with novelistic sensitivity: Pat, an aspiring actress with a yen for Burt Reynolds; Claudia, a roller-skating interior designer; Jackie, the activist whose anti-nuclear advocacy dovetails with Ross’s deepest fears; and above all, Charleen Swansea, Ross’s mentor and a one-woman Greek chorus of unsolicited romantic counsel. A landmark of first-person filmmaking that presaged everything from Michael Moore to reality TV, Sherman’s March will soon be available in a new 4K restoration.”
See the trailer and poster below.
