Ross McElwee was holding a grant to make a documentary about the lingering aftermath of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's 1864 march to the sea. What he made instead became one of the most influential American documentaries ever released — and on Oct. 18, it returns to Charleston for a single afternoon screening at the Terrace Theater, part of the 13th annual Charleston Film Festival.
The film's full title is a mouthful and a mission statement: Sherman's March: A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation. McElwee set out to trace the path of Sherman's Civil War campaign through the South. Then his girlfriend broke up with him, and he shifted his attention from the historical to the personal.
The result is a film that starts as history and goes sideways into the battlefield of modern love. Along the way McElwee lands at Charleston haunts and other Southern locales, meeting a guitar-strumming staffer at the Ashley Hall girls school — which he dubbed "the very cradle of Southern womanhood" — a Burt Reynolds-fixated aspiring actress, a roller-skating interior designer, an anti-nuclear activist whose advocacy dovetails with his deepest Cold War fears, and a linguist roughing it on a sea island near Savannah. Presiding over much of it is Charleen Swansea, McElwee's larger-than-life mentor and a one-woman Greek chorus of unsolicited romantic counsel.
Sherman's March won the Grand Jury Prize at the 1987 Sundance Film Festival and went on to become a landmark of first-person filmmaking, a template that presaged everything from Michael Moore to reality television. Music Box Films, which handles the film, calls it "a generous and humanistic portrait of several remarkable women" sketched "with novelistic sensitivity." It is now available in a new 4K restoration, which is what Charleston audiences will see.
"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 he was also keenly aware of the Cold War that was still in play at the time.
For Terrace Theater owner Paul Brown, the film was the ideal headliner for a festival that runs Oct. 15 through Oct. 18 and rolls out about a dozen films. "It's the perfect movie in some ways," Brown said. "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."
Brown also sees McElwee's approach re-emerging in the documentary genre. "What's old is new again," he said. "It heads in one direction only to find its footing in its discovery."
McElwee, a North Carolina native now based in Boston, taught filmmaking at Harvard University until he retired in 2024. He admitted he wasn't sure what to expect from the 40th-anniversary revival. "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," he said. "I've made many films since then, but they played to smaller audiences."
He needn't have worried. The film's wry, wending search for love — seen from the vantage of a thirty-something man looking to the future — struck a chord with Southerners and anyone fascinated by the region, and it has held cult-classic status ever since.
The festival is also firming up plans to screen McElwee's 2025 film Remake over the weekend. Where Sherman's March was always looking forward, Remake looks backward. It folds in some of the original film's featured subjects while charting the head-scratching, humorous efforts to option Sherman's March for a fictional adaptation. Then it takes its own turn: McElwee's son Adrian, who grew up inside his father's films and eventually began experimenting with the camera himself, was swept into a deepening drug addiction and died of a fentanyl overdose, leaving behind hours of personal video footage. Retracing Adrian's final years, McElwee reckons with what his camera captured and what remained hauntingly out of frame.
"My son died and then from then on I realized I couldn't make that film," McElwee said. "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."
Remake premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2025 and was an official selection at the 2026 True/False Film Festival. The New York Times called it "possibly his masterpiece," and Slate's Sam Adams wrote that "one of the great American filmmakers is back with a crushing cautionary tale." Brown sees the throughlines between the two films: "Both Sherman's March and Remake are extremely personal, but in very different ways."
That pairing — the young filmmaker chasing love across the South, and the older one reckoning with loss through the footage he kept — is the kind of programming Brown says the festival exists to do. "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," he said. "Now we can show movies that may not sustain a full run but are worth seeing and discussing."
The Sherman's March 40th-anniversary screening is set for 2:30 p.m. Oct. 18 at the Terrace Theater, the film's only Charleston showing. Other festival highlights include speaker-attended screenings of We Met at Grossinger's with Bob Friedman; The Tasters, presented by the Nuovo Cinema Italiano Film Festival with 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.