Remake

REMAKE   ***

Ross McElwee

2025

IDEA:  While Hollywood targets his 1986 documentary Sherman's March for a fiction remake, Ross McElwee reflects on the intersection of his filmmaking practice with his relationship with his late son Adrian, who died from an accidental fentanyl overdose in 2016.

BLURB:  The act of recreation, somewhat counterintuitively, typically entails alteration. We can never exactly reproduce the original; something about the way it looked, felt, or meant is unavoidably changed. Ross McElwee’s classic 1986 documentary Sherman’s March is not his only work being remade (however unsuccessfully) in the director’s Remake: so too are his memories, and by extension the decades of footage to which they’re inextricably linked. By meditating on the death of his son Adrian, the famously self-reflexive McElwee simultaneously ruminates on a life organized and revised by moving images, constantly crossing the porous border between reality and representation. The filmmaker’s memories become his filmed scenes (and vice versa), and in piecing them together in non-chronological montage, he considers how they shed their temporal bearings, unfolding completely in the present as the traces of the reality to which they no longer belong. In one of his most poignant musings, he wonders if all that footage of Adrian has retroactively turned his son into a fictional character he now primarily knows through the screen. The ethical implications here, especially related to McElwee’s misgivings about how his constant filming of Adrian might have harmed his son’s mental health, are powerful, if underexplored. But there is never any doubt that Remake is an impassioned, lucid, heartsick elegy from father to son through the medium that structured/s so much of their lives, often mutually. Among other things, it is a testament to how that medium can be a form of therapy, remaking fragmentary, ephemeral, and painful experiences as a narrative we can put our arms around.