Remake

Co-presented by American Documentary | POV

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 reflection 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.

Written, Filmed, Edited, Produced, And Directed By Ross Mcelwee.

“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” – Variety  

“Emotionally piercing… meaningful and poignant” – The Playlist

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
It’s been fourteen years since I completed my last film, Photographic Memory. What animated that film was the sense that I no longer understood my son, Adrian, the way I once thought I did. As a child, Adrian liked being filmed, and I liked filming him. It was a process that linked us. But as the years went by, things changed – for him and for me. When Adrian died, suddenly and unexpectedly, in the winter of 2016, I wasn’t sure I would make another film. Eventually I started going through my home movies again, all these accumulated moments with my son, who was now no longer here. And then I began to look at what he’d filmed too. Remake is both my attempt to hold onto Adrian, and to let him go.