ROSS McELWEE
Bright Leaves
Sep. 25 2018
MassArt Design and Media Center
ROSS McELWEE | Ross McElwee grew up in North Carolina. He graduated from Brown University and later from Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he received a MS in filmmaking. McElwee started producing and directing documentaries in 1976.
Ross McElwee has made seven feature-length documentaries as well as several shorter films. Most of his films were shot in his homeland of the American South, among them the critically acclaimed Sherman’s March, Time Indefinite, Six O’Clock News, and Bright Leaves.
McElwee’s films have been included in the festivals of Berlin, London, Vienna, Rotterdam, Florence, Sydney, and Wellington. Retrospectives include the Museum of Modern Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; the American Museum of the Moving Image, New York; and États généraux du film documentaire in Lussas, France. McElwee has received fellowships and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the American Film Institute, and the Massachusetts Arts Council.
Ross McElwee has been teaching filmmaking at Harvard University since 1986 where he is a professor in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies.
BRIGHT LEAVES | This film describes a journey taken across the social, economic, and psychological tobacco terrain of North Carolina by a native Carolinian whose great-grandfather created the famous brand of tobacco known as “Bull Durham.”
Bright Leaves is a subjective, autobiographical meditation on the allure of cigarettes and their troubling legacy for the state of North Carolina. It’s about loss and preservation, addiction and denial. And it’s about filmmaking – homemovie, documentary, and fiction filmmaking – as the filmmaker fences with the legacy of an obscure Hollywood melodrama that is purportedly based on his great-grandfather’s life.
Bright Leaves explores the notion of legacy – what one generation passes down to the next – and how this can be a particularly complicated topic when the legacy under discussion is a Southern one and is tied to tobacco.