Watch the Trailers for Ross McElwee’s 4K Restoration of ‘Sherman’s March’ and More Personal ‘Remake’
For about four decades, Ross McElwee has been one of the most revered pioneers of documentary filmmaking. Now, Music Box Films will be rolling out two of his greatest works in select theaters this July! The first is a 4K restoration of his 1986 comedic documentary, Sherman’s March, which will celebrate its 40th anniversary. Winner of the U.S. Documentary Grand Jury Prize at the 1987 Sundance Film Festival, it follows McElwee, whose original intention of making a documentary about the effects of Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman’s campaign in the South unintentionally turned into a more personal document about his love life and becoming enamored with various women on his travels.
His more recent documentary, Remake (having premiered at last year’s Venice Film Festival), takes on a more personal and emotional tone as he revisits his relationship with his late son Adrian, who appeared in numerous films of his father’s before eventually working alongside him. Partially built around an attempt to adapt Sherman’s March into a narrative feature, McElwee shifts his attention to his relationship with Adrian through archival footage and ponders the role he may have played in his son’s path in a way that can break the hearts of parents all over.
The Sherman’s March 4K restoration will open at New York’s Film Forum on Friday, July 3, before opening July 17 in LA. McElwee will appear in person at Film Forum for Q&As moderated by Ira Glass on July 8 and Mira Nair on July 9.
Remake will open at Film Forum on Friday, July 10, before heading to LA on July 17. Post-screening Q&As at Film Forum will be moderated by Yance Ford on July 10 and Kirsten Johnson on July 11.
As the official synopsis for the Sherman’s March restoration reads:
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 is now available in a new 4K restoration.
Watch the trailer for the 4K restoration of Sherman’s March below.
Here’s the official synopsis for Remake:
Filmmaker Ross McElwee has spent forty years recording himself and his family, creating documentaries that chronicle the shifting contours of American society through the lens of personal history. His son Adrian grew up inside those films, and eventually began experimenting with the camera himself. When a Hollywood producer acquires the rights to adapt McElwee’s 1986 breakthrough SHERMAN’S MARCH into a work of fiction, twenty-year-old Adrian sees a chance for his father to finally reach a wider audience. As the adaptation stalls, Adrian gets swept into a deepening drug addiction and dies from a fentanyl overdose, leaving behind hours of personal video footage. Retracing Adrian’s final years, McElwee reckons with what his camera captured and what remained hauntingly out of frame. As he reflects on a lifetime behind the camera, Ross’s own effort to remix and remake the movie that Adrian never got to finish takes on new significance. An ever-expanding hall of mirrors built from decades of home movies, REMAKE is both McElwee’s attempt to hold onto his son, and to let him go.
Watch the official trailer below.
