#  Ross McElwee 

Emeritus

 

 

 



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Ross McElwee has made 12 feature-length films. *Sherman’s March* won Best Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival and was chosen for preservation by the U.S Library of Congress National Film Registry in 2000 as a “historically significant American motion picture.” *Bright Leaves* premiered at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival’s Directors’ Fortnight. McElwee's *In Paraguay* premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2008, and he returned to Venice in 2011 to premiere *Photographic Memory*. In 2025, his latest film, *Remake,* also premiered at Venice. His films have been extensively written about in the US and European press. In 2005, complete retrospectives of McElwee’s films were presented at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and later in Brussels, Milan, Lisbon, Moscow, New Zealand, Seoul, Quito, Riga, Latvia and Nyon, Switzerland.  
  
Four of his films were featured in a selection of western documentaries shown for the first time in Tehran, and in 2015, McElwee presented his films in Changchun, Guangzhou, and Beijing, China. In 2018, Documenta Madrid held a complete retrospective of McElwee’s films. In 2019, a complete retrospective was presented in Paris at Centre Pompidou.

McElwee has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the American Film Institute. He has twice been awarded fellowships in filmmaking by the National Endowment for the Arts and production grants from the LEF foundation. McElwee received the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival’s Career Award in 2007 the Pennebaker Award for his career in 2023, and the True Vision award from the True/False Documentary Festival in 2026.

##### Films: 

*Charleen* (1978)  
 Portrait of a North Carolina native Charleen Swansea, a protégé of Ezra Pound, poet, and innovative teacher in the public schools; a month in her fast-paced eccentric life. Premiered MoMA: Cineprobe

*Space Coast* (1980) directed with Michel Negroponte  
 A look into the lives of three families living on Cape Canaveral five years after the Apollo Moon Landing Program was phased out, adversely affecting the local community.  
 Premiered Whitney Museum of American Art: New American Filmmakers

*Resident Exile* (1981)  
 Two months in the life of an Iranian living in Houston, Texas during the Iranian/American hostage crisis; portrait of a man without a country.  
 Co-directed by Ross McElwee, Michel Negroponte and Alexandra Anthony for PBS

*Backyard* (1984)  
 An autobiographical look at the filmmaker's relationship with his father, and his family's  
relationship with the African-American people who have worked for them; a study of the genteel uneasiness underlying black/white relationships in one North Carolina household.  
 Premiered ICA, Boston  
  
*Sherman’s March: A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation* (1986)  
 An autobiographical documentary on life, love, nuclear war preparedness, and the various neuroses of General William Sherman.  
 Premiered Berlin Film Festival

*Something to Do With the Wall* (1990) Co-directed with Marilyn Levine  
 A portrait of the Checkpoint Charlie area of the Berlin Wall by two filmmakers who remember growing up with The Wall and The Cold War; a view of Berliners who live near the checkpoint, the American military which controls it, and the tourists who visit it. Filmed in 1986 during the 25th anniversary of the building of The Wall and in 1989, after the opening of The Wall.  
 Premiered Leningrad International Film Festival

*Time Indefinite* (1993)  
 Takes up where "Sherman's March" left off. The filmmaker confronts love, marriage, life, death, and other matters of importance.  
 Premiered Film Forum, NYC  
  
*Six O’clock News* (1996)   
 The filmmaker drives across America obsessively watching catastrophic stories from local television news in the various communities he visits. He then seeks out the people he has seen in the news to do more personal, in-depth portraits. A meditation on media, mortality, and theology — American style.  
 Premiered Sundance Film Festival  
  
Bright Leaves (2003)  
 An exploration of legacy - a particularly complicated topic when the legacy is Southern and is tied both to tobacco and a 1950 Hollywood melodrama starring Gary Cooper.

*In Paraguay* (2008)  
 The filmmaker, his wife, and son travel to Paraguay to adopt a baby. A meditation on Paraguayan history and politics, US foreign policy, a toucan in a cage, and a little girl named Mariah.

*Photographic Memory* (2011)  
 The filmmaker returns to a village in France where he worked as a wedding photographer 38 years earlier. A meditation on the passing of time, the praxis of photography and film, digital versus analog, and the fractured love of a father for his son.

*Remake* (2025)  
 The death of his son causes McElwee to look back on his life’s work. He eventually turns to his archive of home movies — an afternoon trapping crayfish with his son Adrian, age 4; helping with homework, age 11; discussing career plans with his son, age 24. 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 by a Hollywood director to adapt McElwee’s documentary *Sherman’s March* into a work of fiction lurches along, giving the filmmaker another perspective from which to meditate on movie making and mortality.

McElwee was Professor of the Practice of Filmmaking in the Department of Art, Film and Visual Studies at Harvard beginning in 2003 until his retirement in 2024. He is now a Research Professor, Emeritus in the AFVS Department, where he is working on his next film.



 

 

 





 

 

- ## Role
    
     [Emeriti](/role/emeriti)