Ross McElwee - Bright Leaves (2003)

Posted By: newland

Date: Feb. 29, 2008

Ross McElwee - Bright Leaves (2003) [DVDrip]
English | Subtitles: none (sadly…) | 1:47:10 | 704x416 | 23.97fps | Xvid | Audio: MP3 - 128kbps | 990 MB

Bright Leaves describes a journey taken across the social, economic, and psychological tobacco terrain of North Carolina by a native Carolinian, Ross McElwee, whose great-grandfather created the famous brand of tobacco known as Bull Durham. It's also a film about family history, addiction, denial, and filmmaking.

To describe Ross McElwee's documentary film Bright Leaves as a study of the tobacco industry in his native state of North Carolina would be a little like calling a Virginia Woolf novel a manual of etiquette. By the end of this reflective, wise, often hilarious movie, you feel as though he has slapped a huge chunk of raw, palpitating life onto the screen. Birth, death, illness, family and social history, childhood and old age, moviemaking, geography and commerce are among the topics Mr. McElwee weaves into a dense but surprisingly orderly bundle of information, memory and conjecture. Bright Leaves leaves you feeling invigorated by the boundless curiosity, humor and high spirits of its creator. The New York Times

In Bright Leaves, perhaps his best film, McElwee, a native North Carolinian living in Boston, returns to his roots for, as his wife says, his periodic transfusion of southern-ness….For McElwee, moviemaking is ultimately a kind of mystical correspondence between those who have died and those who live on. While making his new film, he imagines that his boy is looking back at his screen image from some distant point in the future, when McElwee himself is gone. No child of a moviemaker could ask for a more beautiful bequest. New York Magazine

Somehow, the real life that McElwee uncovers is always infinitely more quirky and comical than the fictional worlds that most screenwriters create. Idiosyncratic, funny and genuine, Bright Leaves is a little gem. Screen Daily

I attended a public screening of Bright Leaves, shown in the Cannes Film Festival's Directors' Fortnight section, and was amazed to hear the bravos and cheers afterward from a predominantly French audience. Obviously, McElwee's wry, touching, deeply humane road journey through North Carolina struck a nerve with an international crowd, despite its personal and regional scope. The Boston Phoenix

If you expect movies to be "about" anything in particular, this film will doubtless leave you scratching your head in frustration and bafflement. If you can accept a movie that is a beautifully paced (quick/elegiac/quick) romp by a quirky mind with one of the sharpest eyes around, you'll have a great time. IMDB review

IMDB review and DVD description.

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