Ross McElwee

Hailed by some as a cinematic genius, a feminist voice and a true maverick of American cinema, dismissed by others as a voyeuristic fraud and the "world's worst director," Henry Jaglom obsessively confuses and abuses the line between life and art. Featuring scores of interviews (including Orson Welles, Dennis Hopper, Milos Forman and Peter Bogdanovich) and rare behind-the-scenes footage, this hilarious documentary explores the fascinating question of Who Is Henry Jaglom?

In 1986, Ross McElwee (Sherman's March) and Marilyn Levine were making a film about the 25th anniversary of the Berlin Wall, when the imposing structure was still very much intact as the world’s most visible symbol of hardline Communism and Cold War lore. They thought they were making a documentary on the community of tourists, soldiers, and West Berliners who lived in the seemingly eternal presence of the graffiti emblazoned eyesore. But in 1989, as the original film neared completion, the Wall came down, and McElwee and Levine returned to Berlin, this time to capture the radically different atmosphere of the reunified city.

The death of his son causes McElwee, an autobiographical filmmaker, to look back on his life’s work. He eventually turns to his archive of home movies. 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 to adapt McElwee’s first feature, Sherman’s March, into a work of fiction lurches along, giving the filmmaker another perspective from which to meditate on movie making and mortality.

Ross McElwee sets out to make a documentary about the lingering effects of General Sherman's march of destruction through the South during the Civil War, but is continually sidetracked by women who come and go in his life, his recurring dreams of nuclear holocaust, and Burt Reynolds.

After documentarian Ross McElwee gets married, a series of misfortunes follow: his grandmother dies, his wife miscarries, and then his father dies less than a week later. Shaken by the sudden string of deaths, McElwee becomes depressed. After spending time with his friend and former high school poetry teacher, Charlene, he goes to meet his brother, a doctor. In a series of interviews, McElwee contemplates his morbid preoccupation with death and tries to figure out how to shake it off.

An unsentimental elegy to the American West, Sweetgrass follows the last modern-day cowboys to lead their flocks of sheep up into Montana's breathtaking and often dangerous Absaroka-Beartooth mountains for summer pasture, revealing a world in which nature and culture, animals and humans, vulnerability and violence are all intimately meshed.

Ross McElwee travels through the North Carolina tobacco belt in search of the ancient southern traditions associated with tobacco growing and use, while comparing his filmmaking to commercial cinema, represented by Bright Leaf, a melodrama directed by Michael Curtiz in 1950, starring Gary Cooper, apparently based on the life of his great-grandfather.

In Charleen, documentarian Ross McElwee looks at the life of a North Carolina poet and teacher who acts as a muse to a motley crew of artists and musicians.

Documentary film maker Ross McElwee returns to his family home in Charlotte NC. In filming his family, he captures a microcosm of Southern society.

Vladimir is an impeccably dressed student who wants to become a spy. In pursuit of this goal he learns all he can about espionage, learning codes and leaving secret messages for his college roommate (the narrator). Vladimir tries his best to become a real spy, but when he has no luck in his attempt to join several spy agencies, he quits his spy hobby. Then one day he vanishes.

Distressed over his teenaged son's addiction to the Internet and fearful that the developing boy has grown detached from the real world, documentary filmmaker Ross McElwee takes a journey back into his own adolescence by returning to St. Quay-Portrieux in Brittany, France, which he visited as a teen, and attempting to track down the photographer who gave him his first job, and the girl who once stole his heart.

This short film, made with my friends and filmmaking partners, Michel Negroponte and Alex Anthony, was commissioned by PBS's innovative TV Lab in 1980. The three of us saw Kazem Ala, an Iranian student and political exile, briefly interviewed on a local cable access show in Austin, Texas and were very moved by his story. We spent a month filming his day to day life in Houston, during the Iranian-American hostage crisis of 1980. The film was meant to describe in subtle ways what it is to be a political exile in times of political crisis. PBS found it to be a little too subtle, and declined to air it nationally, but the film was televised on various individual PBS outlets, and seeing it recently, I was struck by how, a generation later, we're still dealing with this same situation - the clash between Islam and the West. The Presidents and Ayatollahs may have changed, but politically, things are still at crisis level. - Ross McElwee

Filmmaker Ross McElwee trails characters whose stories have been fodder for television news and takes their tales of loss and longing further than the requisite sound bite. In the process, he examines how the medium works and exposes its limitations.

This film provides a broad overview of Ju/'hoan life, both past and present, and an intimate portrait of N!ai, a Ju/'hoan woman who in 1978 was in her mid-thirties. N!ai tells her own story, and in so doing, the story of Ju/'hoan life over a thirty year period. "Before the white people came we did what we wanted," N!ai recalls, describing the life she remembers as a child: following her mother to pick berries, roots, and nuts as the season changed; the division of giraffe meat; the kinds of rain; her resistance to her marriage to /Gunda at the age of eight; and her changing feelings about her husband when he becomes a healer. As N!ai speaks, the film presents scenes from the 1950's that show her as a young girl and a young wife. The uniqueness of N!ai may lie in its tight integration of ethnography and history. While it portrays the changes in Ju/'hoan society over thirty years, it never loses sight of the individual, N!ai.

Early documentary short by Ross McElwee. 16mm; color; sound.

Focusing on three residents of Cape Canaveral, Florida this film puts forward the thesis that a decline in NASA's space program after the moon landings has left the local community impoverished.

Early documentary short by Ross McElwee. 16mm; color; sound.

Documentary film by Ross McElwee about his family's process to adopt a Paraguayan infant girl named Mariah.