By Elizabeth Weitzman

Each of Ross McElwee’s deeply personal documentaries is built directly atop a fault line that separates — or connects — the microcosmic and the universal.

But few films could be more unsparingly intimate than “Remake,” and it’s no spoiler to say why: before we’re five minutes in, he’s bluntly shared the gut-punch purpose of this project. To quote his narration, which is spoken directly to his son Adrian, it’s “to convince myself that you were alive, but also to convince myself that you’re gone.”