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Now the 57-year-old filmmaker—a Harvard film prof—has become fascinated with his own heritage, with questions about the generations that preceded him. Tying together the importance of tobacco in his great-grandfather's story and medicine in his father's, McElwee interviews his dad's former patients. We also have the privilege of witnessing moments when this thoughtful man makes discoveries about his own family. One woman remembers Dr. McElwee's visit to her own dad the night before major surgery, when the two men prayed together. McElwee seems surprised: "My father did? ... I never heard that story." To which the woman replies, "Oh well, sometimes daddies don't talk about things like that."

The filmmaker then cuts to the woman's aging parents harmonizing "Silent Night," then cuts again to decades-old family movie footage of his father listening to those same folks singing that same song to him over the telephone, an annual Christmas tradition. It's not apparent at first, but as the senior McElwee speaks to them on the phone, he turns his head and, inexplicably, we see that he is wearing a yarmulke. The filmmaker says, "Right after I filmed this, I kept meaning to ask my father why he, a staunch Presbyterian, was wearing a yarmulke here. Was it just a somewhat odd Christmas present from a grateful Jewish patient? I kept forgetting to ask him, and now it's just one of those things I'll never know."

That's the appeal of a McElwee documentary, right there. He's not setting out to prove anything, to persuade us of answers he already knows. No, he's out to ask questions, and to see what other questions each of those questions will lead us to. McElwee doesn't narrow life down into a political position or a thesis about human nature: he takes the mundane events of ordinary life and widens them, opens them up by asking questions, pointing out the things we can't quite know or never would have realized. He has more to do with art than propaganda, more to do with mystery than explanation.

In every one of his documentaries, McElwee's South is, as Flannery O'Connor said, "Christ-haunted." Bright Leaves in particular brings us people of faith, cancer victims and tobacco farmers alike whose faith in Jesus helps them with—or perhaps diverts them from?—the difficult questions posed to them by life in general, or by this inquisitive filmmaker in particular. Whether it's a heartfelt "Silent Night" offered as a Christmas appreciation, or gospel quartet numbers like "Gospel Ship" or "Ship Of Zion" sung by a tobacco grower who wonders how his religion and his work fit together, the film frequently uses music to introduce a spiritual context for its subjects. And if McElwee might question the consistency of a Christian man earning a living by growing the bright leaves that cause the premature death of so many, he does so with a light and respectful touch: his affection for these good and faith-filled people is obvious, and he never condescends to pass judgment.

Perhaps McElwee's films are nothing more than mildly diverting video journals, charting the modestly interesting preoccupations of a mild but obsessive man as he wanders down whatever side road he comes upon. Perhaps the insights he finds, and the connections he makes between things, are in fact not very substantial or significant after all. On the other hand, these films (especially the later ones) may be marvels of loving observation and understatement that work on us slowly and subliminally, teasing awake our slumbering curiosity about the apparently ordinary details of our own lives. Perhaps they offer genuine, if elusive, profundities, presenting them in a self-effacing and amusing way that grows increasingly precious as the avalanche of non-fiction media grows more shrill and superficial every day.

Bright Leaves is showing in limited theaters, slowly making its rounds in North America. Click here for a list of screenings.

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