For the past twenty-five years, Ross McElwee has given new meaning and flair to first-person nonfiction cinema. A native of Charlotte, North Carolina, McElwee studied at MIT with the legendary filmmakers Richard Leacock and Edward Pincus, from whom he learned that the verité documentarian need not be a detached recorder of events — as practitioners of direct cinema in the 1960s often claimed — but rather an engaged, even intrusive, participant in the unfolding action. The confessional mode of McElwee’s autobiographical films is always wise and irreverent yet rarely solipsistic; ever the unreliable narrator, McElwee is aware of the strictures of self-knowledge, and of our limited ability to know the hearts and minds of others. In his films to date, he has chronicled his encounters with family and friends, lovers and strangers, in ways that have caused those relationships to change, while also having broader implications for race relations in America and the history and culture of the South. McElwee makes the grandest themes of human comedy his artistic province: love and death, chance and fate, memory and denial, the marvelous and the appalling. — Musuem of Modern Art