Ross McElwee has filmed his life since the 1970s. SHERMAN’S MARCH (1986), TIME INDEFINITE (1993), BRIGHT LEAVES (2003) — his camera is both instrument and confession. His son Adrian was born into this practice, filmed from infancy, through adolescence, and into years that got harder. In 2016, Adrian died of a fentanyl overdose at 27. Drawing from decades of footage from Ross and Adrian — also a filmmaker — REMAKE asks questions that could only come after: What did the camera capture, what did it miss, and what did it do to the father-son relationship while both were still in the room? Threaded through is a stalled Hollywood effort to turn SHERMAN’S MARCH into a fiction film, giving McElwee another angle on the distance between experience and its representation. Charleen Swansea, the unforgettable force of SHERMAN’S MARCH, reappears in REMAKE. (Synopsis from the True/False Film Festival)
“McElwee has stated that REMAKE was his attempt to hold onto Adrian and also to let him go. He succeeds in that charge, but that tension he describes, of clinging to memory while desiring to relinquish it, defines McElwee’s vision to a tee…. REMAKE, like all of McElwee’s personal cinema, embody the passage of time itself. In other words, it’s the stuff of life.” —Vikram Murthi, Critic’s Pick, IndieWire “As emotionally overwhelming as one might expect, but far from a one-note grief memoir. There’s tender self-examination here, and even spry humor…. REMAKE is extraordinarily clear-eyed for a work so broken-hearted: at once a home movie, an intimate diary and an expansive study of the filmmaker’s purpose, constantly disrupting its own conclusions with expressions of anger, amusement and still-unresolved confusion.” —Guy Lodge, Variety “McElwee probes the very idea of memory itself, and in perhaps his crowning achievement as a documentarian, fails to come up with any definitive answers, yet somehow still moves closer to the truth than he ever had before.” —Warren Cantrell, The Playlist
