When a Sundance Classic Gets the Hollywood Remake Treatment—and Becomes Something Unexpected

In 1987, documentary filmmaker Ross McElwee won Sundance with Sherman’s March, a film born from heartbreak and circumstance. He’d set out to make a straight historical documentary about General William Sherman’s Civil War march through the South, but his girlfriend dumped him midway through production. What emerged instead was something far more singular: a deeply personal, funny, and touching portrait of the filmmaker himself, wandering the South with camera in hand, falling in and out of attraction with various women along the way. It became one of the defining works of personal documentary cinema.

Fast forward four decades. Hollywood came calling, offering to remake Sherman’s March as a mainstream comedy directed by Steve Carr, who helmed Paul Blart: Mall Cop. The premise is surreal on its face—why would you remake a singular, intimate documentary with a big studio comedy machine? Yet McElwee saw something worth exploring. He was curious about fictional filmmaking, about learning the grammar of a different kind of cinema. And his late son Adrian, also a documentarian, had long pushed his father to make a“real movie”—one with actors and crews and the whole apparatus McElwee had always avoided.

The remake never quite happened. But the collision between that aborted Hollywood project and McElwee’s unfinished archives became his new film, Remake. It weaves the surreal story of a Sundance classic being pitched as a Paul Blart spin-off with the intimate, painful, and ultimately redemptive journey of sifting through footage of Adrian, who died of a drug overdose in his 20s. The result is poignant and upsetting and unexpectedly funny—a film about losing your footing after a lifetime of knowing exactly where to stand.

What makes Remake so striking is how it uses formal play as an emotional instrument. McElwee describes his son’s footage as mirroring his own filmmaking style, yet Adrian was in some ways more aggressive with the camera, more willing to capture unflinching honesty. In mixing Adrian’s work with his own, and threading through the absurdist tale of the remake offer, McElwee creates something that feels like a collaboration with someone no longer here. It’s a conversation across time, mediated by film stock and memory.

The larger question haunting both films—the original Sherman’s March and this new Remake—is about how personal filmmaking itself has transformed. McElwee notes that the intimate, first-person documentary form he pioneered in the’80s has exploded into a million daily videos on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. YouTubers and influencers and vloggers are now making movies like his constantly. Is that better or worse? McElwee seems genuinely unsure. But one thing is clear: the landscape has changed. People are wary of cameras now, skeptical of being filmed. The casual intimacy that allowed McElwee to film freely in the South is largely gone.

Sherman’s March and Remake are playing at Film Forum in New York City this week, alongside a newly restored print of the original. It’s a rare chance to see these films in conversation—to measure the distance between who McElwee was as a young documentarian chasing romantic entanglements through Dixie, and who he became after loss reshaped him. And to understand how the tools of personal filmmaking have become ubiquitous while remaining, somehow, harder to use with honesty and grace.