Forty years after Sherman’s March established Ross McElwee as one of the defining voices of autobiographical documentary, Remake returns to the images that have shaped both his life and his cinema. The film begins with an unlikely premise: a television network has acquired the rights to remake Sherman’s March as a fiction film. Yet, as so often in McElwee’s work, the original project quietly gives way to another. The sudden death of his son Adrian, himself an aspiring filmmaker, transforms the film into a profoundly personal meditation on grief and the act of filming those we love.

McElwee has spoken about how he initially found it impossible to revisit moving images of Adrian. Instead, he asked an assistant to extract still frames from decades of footage, using these frozen images as a way of writing himself back into the archive before he could confront the films themselves. Adrian’s own recordings, often far more impulsive and raw than his father’s, gradually enter into conversation with McElwee’s carefully observed images, collapsing the distance between a father and son’s distinct filmic approaches.

The title ultimately refers to much more than Hollywood’s unrealised adaptation. As McElwee himself suggests, the film becomes an attempt to remake a life after devastating loss. Revisiting decades of filmmaking, Remake asks whether images merely preserve the past, or whether they continue to change alongside those who return to them.

TW