Special guest of RPFF 2024 will be the renowned filmmaker Ross McElwee

Ross McElwee four film retrospective with the filmmaker present for Q&As led by Latvian filmmakers and a moderated masterclass.

As part of the 11th Riga Pasaules Film Festival we will have a special focus on the work of Ross McElwee, American documentary filmmaker and Professor of the Practice of Filmmaking at Harvard University. There will be a four film retrospective with the filmmaker present for Q&As led by Latvian filmmakers and a moderated masterclass. Ross McElwee is an internationally renowned American documentary filmmaker. His most acclaimed film Sherman’s March (1986) will open the retrospective and has won numerous awards and was chosen for its historical significance for preservation by the Library of Congress National Film Registry. The programme will include also Time Indefinite (1993), Bright Leaves (2003) and Something to do with the Wall (1991).

A student of Richard Leackock and Ed Pincus, McElwee learnt documentary cinema at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the beginning of the cinéma vérité epoch. He worked as a cameraman for D.A. Pennebaker, and John Marshall. Later, he developed a distinctive style of essay film, using a self-reflexive and auto-ethnographic mode that allowed him to weave stories from his personal life into the fabric of social and political issues of the American South. His films tackle universal topics such as parenthood, family bonds and generational conflicts, existential questions about life and death, as well as love of moving image - a remedy to loss and death. In the background he tells stories of the American South haunted by the reminiscences of the civil war, Southern pride and conservatism.

McElwee was part of the important milestone in the history of documentary cinema – Robert Flaherty seminar that took place in Latvia in 1990, gathering Soviet and American filmmakers. During RPFF, the masterclass moderated by filmmaker Kristīne Briede would be a conversation about continuity and change in documentary praxis after 30 years since the Flaherty seminar.

Published: 17.04.2024.