Ross McElwee

This film describes a journey taken across the social, economic, and pyschological tobacco terrain of North Carolina by a native Carolian, whose great-grandfather created the famous 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 also about filmmaking - home movies, 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.

After his girlfriend leaves him, Ross McElwee takes a voyage along the original route taken by General William Sherman - but rather than cutting a swath of destruction designed for force the Confederate South into submission, as Sherman did, McElwee searches for love, camera in hand, "training his lens with phallic resolve on every accessible woman he meets" (Chicago Readers Circle). The Library of Congress National Film Registry recently chose "Sherman's March" for preservation as a "historically significant American motion picture." It has won documentary awards at numerous film festivals including Sundance, has been cited by the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and chosen as "One of the Top 20 Documentaries of All-Time" by the International Documentary Association.