by Alex Billington
June 25, 2026
Source: YouTube
“People don’t want to see a film about me, they want to see a film about what I see.” Music Box Films has debuted the official trailer for the documentary film titled Remake, the latest powerful work from award-winning American doc filmmaker Ross McElwee, best known for his 1986 doc Sherman’s March. This premiered at the 2025 Venice Film Festival last fall, and it also played at the True/False Film Festival this year. A lifetime of beautifully-captured images of his family allows director Ross McElwee to craft a heartfelt love letter to his late son Adrian, who struggled with mental illness & drug addiction. With the premise of chronicling the process of turning his acclaimed Sherman’s March into a fictional movie, McElwee picks up the threads of all his previous films—family, love, death, legacy, time—to expertly weave a new portrait that moves between reflection and revelation, exploring the tensions between commercial cinema and artistic integrity, and simultaneously creating and recording the bond between father and son. McElwee’s first new film in 14 years, Remake “continues in the vein of the filmmaker’s best work, albeit with more emotional weight than ever before.” Very good film. Exceptionally tragic but immensely soulful & profoundly moving.
Here’s the official trailer (+ poster) for Ross McElwee’s doc film Remake, direct from YouTube:
Filmmaker Ross McElwee has spent 40 years recording himself & his family, creating documentaries that chronicle the shifting contours of American society through the lens of personal history. His son Adrian grew up inside those films, and eventually began experimenting with a camera. When a producer acquires the rights to adapt McElwee’s 1986 breakthrough Sherman’s March into a work of fiction, 20-year-old Adrian sees a chance for his father to finally reach a wider audience. As the adaptation stalls, Adrian gets swept into a deepening drug addiction and dies from a fentanyl overdose, leaving behind hours of video footage. Retracing Adrian’s final years, McElwee reckons with both what his camera captured & what remained hauntingly out of frame. As he reflects on his lifetime behind the camera, Ross’s own effort to remix & remake the movie that Adrian never got to finish takes on new significance. An ever-expanding hall of mirrors built from decades of home movies, it’s his attempt to hold onto his son, and to let him go.
Remake is directed by acclaimed American doc filmmaker Ross McElwee, director of the docs Charleen, Sherman’s March, Something to Do with the Wall, Time Indefinite, Six O’Clock News, Bright Leaves, In Paraguay, and Photographic Memory previously. Produced by Giant Squid, Mark Meatto, Ross McElwee. This initially premiered at the 2025 Venice Film Festival last year. Music Box Films releases McElwee’s Remake film in select US theaters on July 10th, 2026 this summer. For details, visit the film’s official site.
