Remake

A film about the sudden death of the filmmaker Ross McElwee’s son causes him to reassess his approach to filmmaking and to his own life’s work.

2025 | Running Time: 1 Hour 54 minutes | Rating: NR

In Remake, filmmaker Ross McElwee turns his lens on the passage of time and the uneasy space between documenting life and understanding it. The film traces McElwee’s relationship with his son Adrian, and the fragile bond the camera created between them while Adrian was alive, and now that he’s gone. Drawing from decades of footage, some shot by Ross, some by Adrian, the film becomes a layered excavation of memory and image making. Threaded through is the ghost of another project: a stalled effort by Hollywood to fictionalise McElwee’s 1986 classic, Sherman’s March. What emerges is a work shaped by absence and propelled forward by the urge to keep looking, even when there’s no clear story left to tell. Filmmaker: Ross McElwee

“It’s been fourteen years since I premiered my last film, Photographic Memory, here in Venice. 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.”

—Ross McElwee, Filmmaker