Bright Leaves

The classic film was a 1950s Hollywood blockbuster starring Gary Cooper and Lauren Bacall about a tobacco farmer driven out of his hometown by a wealthy industrialist. The family of filmmaker Ross McElwee believes that the story may have been based on the life of his great-grandfather John Harvey McElwee, who came up with the famous tobacco brand Bull Durham – before losing out to the industrialist James Duke. McElwee returns to his native soil in Charlotte, North Carolina to film a blackly comic account of the legacy of the tobacco industry. North Carolina is the biggest tobacco exporter in the U.S., bringing prosperity as well as global addiction and disease. Each year, half a million Americans die of smoking-related illnesses. McElwee embarks on a first-person investigation into the social, economic and psychological consequences of tobacco exploitation. Some of the filmmaker’s own family members are among those who have suffered from smoking. Zealous smokers, tobacco farmers and even relatives of the dead remain in a state of denial: “My growing tobacco doesn’t have anything to do with anyone dying.” McElwee and Duke could surely never have dreamed that tobacco would kill more people than the American Civil War that they narrowly survived.