It’s not every day that you are serenaded with a vintage Ashley Hall school song by an internationally hailed, award-winning septuagenarian documentary maker. But on a phone interview in September, Ross McElwee belted out, “Sing, Sing, Oh Ashley Hall” as if he had heard it countless times.
And, of course, he had. His breakthrough 1986 documentary — Sherman’s March: A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation — won the 1987 Grand Jury Prize at Sundance Film Festival. In it, the engagingly droll documentary filmmaker featured the Charleston private girls school, dubbing it “the very cradle of Southern womanhood.”
In the Terrace Theater’s 13th annual Charleston Film Festival, the sole Charleston showing of Sherman’s March on its 40th anniversary will be at 2:30 p.m. Oct. 18. The film festival starts Oct. 15 and rolls out about a dozen films through Oct. 18.
McElwee said didn’t know what to expect with the re-release.
“I didn’t know if anybody would remember my name, much less films I made or anything because it’s been so long, 40 some years,” McElwee told Charleston City Paper. “I’ve made many films since then, but they played to smaller audiences.”
When Sherman’s March appeared on the historical timeline of independent documentary films, the film got a lot of attention, from both longtime devotees and new audiences, too.
“I hadn’t made a film in 14 years and wasn’t sure if people would respond to it, also wondering whether a younger generation would even show up given that some of them weren’t even born,” said the Boston-based North Carolina native, who was a professor of the practice of filmmaking in the Department of Art, Film and Visual Studies at Harvard University until retiring in 2024.
Sherman’s March
But for the Terrace Film Festival, the film fits the bill to be the headliner.
“It’s the perfect movie in some ways,” said Terrace Theater owner Paul Brown. “I wanted to have a ‘from the vault’ type film that touched on the Lowcountry but in a lateral way and I didn’t want to show a movie that everyone had seen.”
Throughout, McElwee lands at other Charleston haunts, too, as well as other Southern locales as he sets out to trace Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s famous 1864 Civil War march through the South.
But his journey goes sideways when he shifts his time and footage to looking for love. This includes meeting a guitar-strumming staffer at Ashley Hall, a Burt Reynolds-fixated aspiring actress and a linguist roughing it on a sea island near Savannah. He often relies on Charleen Swansea, a larger-than-life, ever entertaining mentor for McElwee as he navigates his often hapless hunt for love.
“It was kind of a risky, risky venture. You can’t really make films like that much anymore, but that’s how I did it,” McElwee said, noting that he was also keenly aware of the Cold War that was still in play at the time.
Add to the cinematic mix that McElwee had just broken up with his girlfriend in New York. His sister prompted him to try to use his camera as a way to meet women.
“I thought that was such a brilliant idea, and I just took that and ran with it, so she deserves some of the credit,” he said.
There are few who have cracked the 1980s South in all its quirk and intrigue in quite the way McElwee does in Sherman’s March, with its novel documentary process that Brown said was reemerging in the genre.
As for its filmmaking, Brown is spotting the approach re-emergent in current documentaries. “What’s old is new again. It heads in one direction only to find its footing in its discovery.”
Looking forward, looking back
For Southerners or those fascinated by the region, McElwee’s witty, wending search for love, seen from the vantage of a 30-something man looking to the future, hit a chord that has made the film a cult classic.
At the Terrace Film Festival, plans are still firming up for the festival to also screen McElwee’s 2025 film Remake during the weekend. The new film folds in some of the original work’s featured subjects, while charting the head-scratching, humorous efforts regarding option rights for an adaptation of Sherman’s March.
Then Remake takes its own turn.
“My son died and then from then on I realized I couldn’t make that film,” he said.Through archival footage rather than new, it instead delves deep into the tragic passing of his 27-year-old son Adrian from a fentanyl overdose in 2016. Still, McElwee uses his gentle humor to buoy the gravity of the film throughout.
“There’s really nothing I felt like filming at that time, so my filmmaking became dependent upon my looking back, and I did have a large archive of footage that provided me with what I needed in order to move forward,” McElwee said.
Sherman’s March, he said, was always looking forward and Remake is looking backwards.
“I think it was the first film that I really made in which is primarily my own archival footage and my thoughts about what’s happened in the past.”
McElwee often rolls the camera in his home, at times with family members ducking from the eternal gaze. The intimacy is rare and intensifies the experience in Remake, as McElwee has established himself over his many films as a known entity. This adds immensely to a revisiting of a fentanyl death, shifting the subject from statistic to a story from a voice many know well.
Brown said he sees the throughlines from one film to another, based in McElwee’s distinct creative style.
“Both Sherman’s March and Remake are extremely personal, but in very different ways,” he observed.
Festival picks
And they work in the festival lineup, too.
“Bringing a swath of films that both examine who we are and where we come from, locally or internationally, it intentionally opens up new worlds to our audiences that may not experience these stories in the theater,” Brown said.
Other highlights in the almost two-dozen screening lineup include speaker-attended screenings, including We Met at Grossinger’s, with Bob Friedman; The Tasters, presented by Nuovo Cinema Italiano Film Festival with speaker Giovanna De Luca; Ethan Bloom with Herschel Faber; Pater Noster and the Mission of Light with Christopher Bickel; You Had to Be There, with PURE Theatre’s Rodney Rogers, and Occupational Hazard: The First Coral Reefers.
“Now we can show movies that may not sustain a full run but are worth seeing and discussing,” Brown said.
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