As a fiction-oriented festival, we screen only a small number of documentaries. But when we do, they are either Finnish premieres or otherwise truly significant representatives of their field. Such is the rare and affecting family chronicle Remake from the acclaimed American documentarian Ross McElwee, a work that at once challenges the ethics and meaning of documenting the private lives of our kin.
McElwee’s films have always drawn from his personal sphere, yet he consistently weaves them into history and the world at large. In Remake, he talks about his son Adrian, who died of drugs seven years earlier at the age of 27, and whom he still misses every day. Through a thought-provoking analysis, Ross McElwee weighs up the effects of his habitual recording of family milestones, acknowledging his subjects’ boredom, other choices that could have been made, and Adrian’s regrettable drift into the cinema world.
Over thirty years of home videos create a portrait of a family falling apart that is at times funny, at times sad, but ultimately extremely honest. Ross McElwee has, however, found happiness in a new relationship following his hardships. An authoritative document of non-stop filming gathers memories into an overwhelming meditation on loss. “This isn’t art, this is life,” says a former teacher who is dear to the author.
ROSS McELWEE (b. 1947) is one of those documentarians whose films are accepted by famous film festivals, such as Sundance (Sherman’s March, Best Documentary 1980), Cannes (Bright Leaves, Directors’ Fortnight 2003) and Venice (In Paraguay 2008 and Photographic Memory 2011). A student of the experimental writer John Hawkes and the great cinematographer-director Richard Leacock in his youth, McElwee has made a total of ten feature-length documentary films. Complete retrospectives have been presented around the world in venues including the MoMA in New York and the Pompidou Centre in Paris. On the academic side, McElwee has served as Professor of the Practice of Filmmaking at Harvard.
Timo Malmi