REMAKE (2025)

A Community Collaborations Event
Presented in partnership with Community & Family Resources, who will lead a post-screening panel discussion with Dana Chappuie and Charles Morgan, moderated by Meg Schneider.
"Extraordinarily clear-eyed for a work so broken-hearted: at once a home movie, an intimate diary and an expansive study of the filmmaker’s purpose, constantly disrupting its own conclusions with expressions of anger, amusement and still-unresolved confusion."—Guy Lodge, Variety
Filmmaker Ross McElwee has spent forty years recording himself and his family, creating documentaries that chronicle the shifting contours of American society through the lens of personal history. His son Adrian grew up inside those films, and eventually began experimenting with the camera himself. When a Hollywood producer acquires the rights to adapt McElwee’s 1986 breakthrough Sherman's March into a work of fiction, twenty-year-old Adrian sees a chance for his father to finally reach a wider audience. As the adaptation stalls, Adrian gets swept into a deepening drug addiction and dies from a fentanyl overdose, leaving behind hours of personal video footage.
Retracing Adrian’s final years, McElwee reckons with what his camera captured and what remained hauntingly out of frame. As he reflects on a lifetime behind the camera, Ross’s own effort to remix and remake the movie that Adrian never got to finish takes on new significance. An ever-expanding hall of mirrors built from decades of home movies, Remake is both McElwee’s attempt to hold onto his son, and to let him go.
Meg Schneider is the Community Outreach Specialist and Lead Naloxone Trainer for the University of Iowa Addiction and Recovery Collaborative (UI ARC). She is a certified instructor for Youth Mental Health First Aid and AID (Awareness–Interaction–Direction) Mental Health Training.
Charles Morgan, as a Peer Recovery Coach and the Emergency Department Coordinator for CRUSH. After spending 12 years using and selling prescription narcotics and heroin and then three years using methamphetamine he faced the possibility of 20 years in prison. Since then he has chosen to take his experience and turn it into a career helping those who were once just as lost as he was.
Dana Chappuie is a woman in her late 40s who has overcome many significant challenges, including substance use disorder, brain health struggles, unemployment, homelessness, and the possibility of prison time. She has strived hard to walk alongside others starting as the Volunteer Coordinator and Peer Recovery Coach at Crush and is now going into her 4th year with them as the Operations Manager and a Peer Recovery Specialist focusing primarily on justice-involved individuals.