Ross McElwee Biography: McElwee grew up in North Carolina. He graduated from Brown University and later from Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he received MS in filmmaking in a program headed by documentarian Richard Leacock.
His career began in his hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina where he was a studio cameraman for local evening news, housewife helper shows, and "gospel hour" programs broadcast by the local television station. Later, he worked freelance shooting films for documentarians D.A. Pennebaker and then John Marshall, in Namibia.
McElwee started producing and directing documentaries in 1976. His body of work includes five feature-length documentaries as well as several shorter films most of them shot in his homeland of the South. His work has played nationally in arthouse theaters and has been broadcast on Cinemax and PBS.
In three of his films, "Backyard," "Sherman's March," and "Time Indefinite," he experimented with a personal autobiographical approach to non-fiction filmmaking, filming as a one-person film crew and weaving into the final film a highly subjective narration along with on-camera experiences by the filmmaker.
McElwee has been a visiting filmmaker at Harvard University for ten years and has been awarded fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
-PBS Frontline
Interview with McElwee: http://www.newenglandfilm.com/news/archives/01december/mcelwee.htm
Artist Website: http://rossmcelwee.com/home.html
Screenshots from Time Indefinite:
A clip from Sherman's March:
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