EXCLUSIVE: Director Ross McElwee, one of America’s most revered nonfiction filmmakers, has been making autobiographical films for over 40 years. His latest, Remake, could not be more personal.

The film, winner of the Golden Globes Prize for documentary at the Venice Film Festival, tells a story of father and son – of Ross McElwee and his late son Adrian, who died in 2016 of an accidental drug overdose. It opens July 10 at Film Forum in New York City and a week later in Los Angeles before a national rollout.

We have your first look at the film in the trailer above.

In Remake, McElwee “turns his lens on the passage of time and the uneasy space between documenting life and understanding it,” notes a synopsis. “The film traces McElwee’s relationship with his son Adrian, and the fragile bond the camera created between them while Adrian was alive, and now that he’s gone.”

The synopsis continues, “Drawing from decades of footage, some shot by Ross, some by Adrian, the film becomes a layered excavation of memory and image making. Threaded through is the ghost of another project: a stalled effort by Hollywood to fictionalize McElwee’s 1986 classic, Sherman’s March. What emerges is a work shaped by absence and propelled forward by the urge to keep looking, even when there’s no clear story left to tell.”

Music Box Films acquired both Remake and Sherman’s March. The company is releasing a 4k restoration of the Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winning Sherman’s March in New York on July 3 and in LA on July 17th.

“It’s been fourteen years since I completed my last film, Photographic Memory,” McElwee writes in a director’s statement. “What animated that film was the sense that I no longer understood my son, Adrian, the way I once thought I did. As a child, Adrian liked being filmed, and I liked filming him. It was a process that linked us. But as the years went by, things changed – for him and for me.

“When Adrian died, suddenly and unexpectedly, in the winter of 2016, I wasn’t sure I would make another film. Eventually I started going through my home movies again, all these accumulated moments with my son, who was now no longer here. And then I began to look at what he’d filmed too.”

McElwee adds, “Remake is both my attempt to hold onto Adrian, and to let him go.”

Remake is written and directed by Ross McElwee and produced by Mark Meatto and McElwee. It was filmed by Ross McElwee and Adrian McElwee; Ross McElwee and Joe Bini edited the film. Executive producers include Geralyn White Dreyfous, Jenny Raskin, Regina K. Skully, Brynn Kelly, Ian Darling, Adam & Melony Lewis, Mark Meatto, and Ross McElwee.

Music Box Films has earned renown as a distributor of acclaimed international, independent, and documentary feature films. Recent releases include Eephus by Carson Lund (Cannes Directors’ Fortnight); Sarah Friedland’s Familiar Touch, starring Kathleen Chalfant (winner of three prizes at the Venice Film Festival, including Best Director in the Venice Horizons section and the Luigi de Laurentiis Award for Best Debut Film); Angus MacLachlan’s A Little Prayer, starring David Strathairn, and Charlie Shackleton’s Zodiac Killer Project (NEXT Innovator Award at Sundance). Upcoming releases include the Dardennes’ Belgian Oscar entry, Young Mothers; Amanda Kramer’s By Design, starring Juliette Lewis, and The Stranger, François Ozon’s adaptation of the Albert Camus novel.

Watch the trailer for Remake above.

Below, see the trailer for the 4k restoration of Sherman’s March.