Ross McElwee – MRQE

Frontline:: Six O’Clock News (TVE)

Fri, 05 Sep 2025 04:00:00 +0000

Filmmaker Ross McElwee trails characters whose stories have been fodder for television news and takes their tales of loss and longing further than the requisite sound bite. In the process, he examines how the medium works and exposes its limitations.

Photographic Memory

Fri, 05 Sep 2025 04:00:00 +0000

Distressed over his teenaged son’s addiction to the Internet and fearful that the developing boy has grown detached from the real world, documentary filmmaker Ross McElwee takes a journey back into his own adolescence by returning to St. Quay-Portrieux in Brittany, France, which he visited as a teen, and attempting to track down the photographer who gave him his first job, and the girl who once stole his heart.

Backyard

Fri, 05 Sep 2025 04:00:00 +0000

Documentary film maker Ross McElwee returns to his family home in Charlotte NC. In filming his family, he captures a microcosm of Southern society.

Sherman’s March

Fri, 05 Sep 2025 04:00:00 +0000

Ross McElwee sets out to make a documentary about the lingering effects of General Sherman’s march of destruction through the South during the Civil War, but is continually sidetracked by women who come and go in his life, his recurring dreams of nuclear holocaust, and Burt Reynolds.

Bright Leaves

Fri, 22 Aug 2025 04:00:00 +0000

Ross McElwee travels through the North Carolina tobacco belt in search of the ancient southern traditions associated with tobacco growing and use, while comparing his filmmaking to commercial cinema, represented by Bright Leaf, a melodrama directed by Michael Curtiz in 1950, starring Gary Cooper, apparently based on the life of his great-grandfather.

Remake

Fri, 05 Sep 2025 04:00:00 +0000

The death of his son causes McElwee, an autobiographical filmmaker, to look back on his lifes work. He eventually turns to his archive of home movies. To what extent did his camera affect their relationship when Adrian was alive? To what extent does it define that relationship now that he is gone? Meanwhile, an effort to adapt McElwees first feature, Shermans March, into a work of fiction lurches along, giving the filmmaker another perspective from which to meditate on movie making and mortality.

Time Indefinite

Mon, 25 Aug 2025 04:00:00 +0000

After documentarian Ross McElwee gets married, a series of misfortunes follow: his grandmother dies, his wife miscarries, and then his father dies less than a week later. Shaken by the sudden string of deaths, McElwee becomes depressed. After spending time with his friend and former high school poetry teacher, Charlene, he goes to meet his brother, a doctor. In a series of interviews, McElwee contemplates his morbid preoccupation with death and tries to figure out how to shake it off.

Something to Do with the Wall

Fri, 05 Sep 2025 04:00:00 +0000

In 1986, Ross McElwee (Sherman’s March) and Marilyn Levine were making a film about the 25th anniversary of the Berlin Wall, when the imposing structure was still very much intact as the worlds most visible symbol of hardline Communism and Cold War lore. They thought they were making a documentary on the community of tourists, soldiers, and West Berliners who lived in the seemingly eternal presence of the graffiti emblazoned eyesore. But in 1989, as the original film neared completion, the Wall came down, and McElwee and Levine returned to Berlin, this time to capture the radically different atmosphere of the reunified city.

Charleen or How Long Has This Been Going On?

Fri, 05 Sep 2025 04:00:00 +0000

In Charleen, documentarian Ross McElwee looks at the life of a North Carolina poet and teacher who acts as a muse to a motley crew of artists and musicians.