Dir: Ross McElwee | Doc 2026
Ross McElwee has always been fascinated by the slippery boundary between real life and the stories we construct around it. In Remake, that fascination becomes intensely personal. The camera, once a way of staying close to his son Adrian, is now also a means of confronting his absence.
What makes the film so compelling is the way McElwee rummages through an extraordinary archive of images accumulated over decades. Some are his, some are Adrian’s, and together they create a strangely intimate dialogue between father and son — a conversation that can no longer take place in ordinary life. Footage that may once have seemed casual or incidental acquires a new emotional charge when viewed through the prism of loss.
But this isn’t simply a film about grief. McElwee remains too curious, self-questioning and mischievous a filmmaker for that. He keeps pulling at the threads of what a camera can actually capture: Is it preserving a moment, altering it, or quietly turning it into something else? And can repeatedly revisiting the past ever bring us closer to what really happened?
Running alongside the personal story is another, wonderfully McElwee-esque strand: Hollywood’s attempt to turn his celebrated 1986 documentary Sherman’s March into a fictional movie. The abandoned project becomes a kind of parallel ghost story — a reminder of what happens when someone else tries to remake reality according to a different set of rules.
The result is a film that feels both intimate and intellectually playful, shifting between memory, mourning, filmmaking and the peculiar afterlife of recorded images. McElwee doesn’t pretend that the camera can solve grief or restore the past. Instead, he uses it to keep searching.
That searching is what gives Remake its pulse. It is an elegy, a meditation on filmmaking and an unexpectedly involving family portrait — but above all, it is a film about the strange, stubborn human desire to look again.
IN CINEMAS FROM 25 September 2026