Ross McElwee’s Classic Doc ‘Sherman’s March’ Is Headed Back to Theaters in a New Restoration Alongside His New ‘Remake’

Exclusive: Music Box Films has acquired the documentarian's most popular film, as well as his latest, for release later this year.

Forty years ago, Ross McElwee won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance for his breakthrough feature “Sherman’s March.” Last year, his latest film, “Remake,” premiered at the Venice Film Festival and took home the Golden Globes Impact Prize for Documentary. Now, as IndieWire shares, both films have been acquired by distributor Music Box Films, which will release “Remake” and a new 4K restoration of “Sherman’s March” later this year.

When it was released in 1986, “Sherman’s March” announced McElwee as a practitioner of a then relatively new form of first-person filmmaking, a style that would influence Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock, among many others, on its way to becoming a dominant documentary subgenre. Ostensibly an attempt to retrace William Tecumseh Sherman’s Civil War march to the sea, the movie becomes a meditation on the “New South” via McElwee’s interactions with women he meets while filming.

Shot on 16mm with McElwee essentially acting as a one-person crew, “Sherman’s March” was added to the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry in 2000 and endures as one of the landmark independent films of the 1980s. For decades, the film has been available only in standard-definition video, making the 40th-anniversary 4K restoration a major event for cinephiles.

In typical McElwee fashion, “Remake” begins with one subject but veers into other, more productive areas. The film’s title comes from McElwee’s account of “Paul Blart: Mall Cop” director Steve Carr’s ill-fated attempt to create a Hollywood remake of “Sherman’s March” as a “peak TV” comedy series, but “Remake” is really about McElwee’s relationship with his son Adrian, who died in 2016 of an accidental drug overdose. Adrian has been a recurring figure in McElwee’s films since “Time Indefinite” in 1993, and in “Remake,” McElwee explores his son’s life and their father/son relationship via decades of footage.

The result is what IndieWire called “an affecting tribute to his son’s life that doubles as a reflective, career-spanning culmination of his life’s work” when the film premiered at Venice in September. Through his relationship with his son, McElwee explores the passage of time and the thorny issues raised by documenting one’s own life and the lives of those close to the documentarian; the poignancy of the film comes from the fact that McElwee’s filmmaking both celebrates Adrian’s life and is considered a factor in his struggles while alive.

The newly restored “Sherman’s March” will open at the Film Forum on July 3, with “Remake” beginning its theatrical rollout at the same theater on July 10 before expanding nationwide. Both are essential viewing.