Sherman's March with Ross McElwee
After the screening of the new 4K rsetoration of Sherman's March, join us for a post-film discussion with director Ross McElwee, moderated by filmmaker Robb Moss.
About Sherman's March:
Body Armed with a 16mm camera and a grant to make a documentary about the lingering aftermath of William Tecumseh Sherman’s 1864 march to the sea, Ross McElwee gets sidetracked. After his girlfriend breaks up with him, Ross shifts his attention from the historical to the personal, to the battlefield of modern love, and embarks on a sociological chronicle that documents the courting rites and rituals of the New South. A generous and humanistic portrait of several remarkable women that Ross meets along the way, Sherman's March sketches its characters with novelistic sensitivity: Pat, an aspiring actress with a yen for Burt Reynolds; Claudia, a roller-skating interior designer; Jackie, the activist whose anti-nuclear advocacy dovetails with Ross’s deepest fears; and above all, Charleen Swansea, Ross’s mentor and a one-woman Greek chorus of unsolicited romantic counsel.
About Ross McElwee
Ross McElwee is a documentary filmmaker from Charlotte, North Carolina currently living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. McElwee has made ten feature-length films. Sherman’s March won Best Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival and was chosen for preservation by the U.S Library of Congress National Film Registry in 2000 as a “historically significant American motion picture.” His films have been extensively written about in the US and European press.
After graduating from Brown in 1971, he received his MS from MIT, studying under documentarians Richard Leacock and Ed Pincus. McElwee was Professor of the Practice of Filmmaking in the Department of Art, Film and Visual Studies at Harvard beginning in 2003 until his retirement in 2024. He is now a Research Professor, Emeritus in the AFVS Department.
About Robb Moss
Robb Moss’ most recent film, The Bend in the River, premiered at the 2025 Telluride Film Festival. The film, the third of a trilogy, follows the lives of five friends from their twenties into the seventies, a meditation on time, friendship and the arc of lived lives. His films toggle between the topical and the personal. Africa Revisited (1981), Secrecy (2008), and Containment (2017) explore racial complexity, government secrecy and nuclear waste, while Riverdogs (1978), The Tourist (1991) and The Same River Twice (2003), explore youthful extravagance, infertility/adoption, and the move from youth to middle age.
His films have premiered twice at both the Sundance and Telluride Film Festivals, exhibited at Lincoln Center, MoMA, reviewed in the New York and Los Angeles Times, nominated for an Independent Spirit award, and shown theatrically in more than seventy Landmark Cinemas. Moss’s work has also been shown in festivals and museums in Lebanon, Germany, Turkey, Austria, England, Iran, Amsterdam, Brazil, Korea, Australia, France, and Israel. He has been a creative advisor at the Sundance Institute’s Doc Edit Labs since their inception in 2004, worked as a festival juror at Sundance, San Francisco, Denver, Camden, Seattle, Chicago, New England, and Ann Arbor, elected to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, served eight years as a Board Director for ITVS, and taught filmmaking at Harvard University for the past 40 years where he is a former chair and current Professor in the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies.
