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![](\"https:\/\/cdn.craft.cloud\/26ed9c78-feb7-4ee6-8ddf-262fd7bafb2d\/assets\/tco\/images\/Remake-Ross-McElwee.jpg\")
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Elsewhere, McElwee films old friends who starred in his earlier films, such as Charleen Swansea, a\u00a0poetry teacher and friend of Ezra Pound who now has dementia and can\u2019t ever remember making Charleen <\/i>or Sherman\u2019s March <\/i>with Ross. \u200b\u201c<\/span>Things just disappear,\u201d Charleen says of her memories. She remarks that she thinks the camera he uses is an ugly piece of machinery, and that it amazes her the beauty he can create from it. He films his wife, Korean documentarian Hyun Kyung Kim, who does not show her face but is seen lovingly tending to their garden, and editing her own film on how the Korean War impacted three generations of her family. He documents his own surgery to remove a\u00a0brain tumour, and recalls how Adrian smuggled a\u00a0small camera into the hospital because he thought being able to film everything again might help his dad recover faster. (It worked.) There is so much pain present in Remake<\/i>, but there is so much love too \u2013 love that seems to radiate through the screen from McElwee\u2019s footage of Adrian and his sister Mariah from birth to adulthood, from the interviews he conducts with his brother and sister to the self-shot footage of him marrying Hyun Kyung Kim, witnessed only by their justiciar.\u00a0<\/p>\n As a\u00a0teenager, Adrian asks Ross a\u00a0question: \u200b\u201c<\/span>Do you ever think about reversing the roles?\u201d Without missing a\u00a0beat, Ross hands Adrian the camera. \u200b\u201c<\/span>People don\u2019t want to see a\u00a0film about me,\u201d he tells his son. \u200b\u201c<\/span>They want to see a\u00a0film about what I\u00a0see.\u201d Of course Ross McElwee must be aware of the irony in this statement, because most of his films have been just as much about him as what he sees, and Remake <\/i>is his most nakedly intimate and devastating work, the culmination of a\u00a0life lived in public for the sake of art. He admits his own tunnel vision; how he\u2019s still angry at himself for not noticing how bad things were for his son before it was too late, and that he still wonders if Adrian had come to believe he was the version of himself that existed in his father\u2019s camera viewfinder rather than the one that lived in the real\u00a0world.\u00a0<\/p>\n But for the great sadness contained within Remake<\/i>, McElwee isn\u2019t a\u00a0trite or sensationalist filmmaker, still employing the lo-fi, intimate style which has found him admirers over the years. This film is a\u00a0remarkable tribute to Adrian, poignant and precise, spliced together from clips and fragments like a\u00a0moving family photo album, masterfully edited by the legendary Joe Bini, known for his collaborations with Lynne Ramsay, Laura Poitras and Werner Herzog. As well as his own footage, Ross includes video shot by his son \u2013 skits, skating tricks, music videos, and stunning skiing footage on the powder white mountain tops of Colorado. McElwee confronts the possibility and limitations of documentary while also reckoning with his own life (and limitations) as a\u00a0father and filmmaker, and what sacrifices he made or asked others to make in the process. But it\u2019s like Adrian told his father as a\u00a0boy with a\u00a0bucket full of crayfish \u2013 time only marches forward, and as much as you can pick the past apart, analyse every frame and try to remake them into something you understand, sometimes clarity never comes. A\u00a0tragedy as sudden and vast as burying a\u00a0child as young and brilliant and brave as Adrian can\u2019t be cut, or edited, or rephrased. All McElwee has are the images that Adrian left behind, and in Remake<\/i>, he has found a\u00a0way to process them into something profound and powerful that illustrates not a\u00a0perfect relationship, but certainly the sort of true magic a\u00a0camera can offer to remind us who we were, and the great beauty in seeing another person through the lens of true unconditional love.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n