One of McElwee's most intricately woven films, Bright Leaves takes as its point of departure McElwee's great-grandfather's role as a 19th century tobacco plantation owner in the south. Upon discovering that there was a 1950 Hollywood movie, Bright Leaf, based on his family's history, McElwee muses over fact and fiction, trying to trace the legacy of his great grandfather's business on his own family and the south at large. Moving between tobacco plantations, family gatherings, lectures in film theory, and recurring dreams he's had, Bright Leaves is an amorphous work filled with the philosophical richness unique to McElwee's eclectic, rambling style.

"McElwee’s films are always, in a way, about why he makes them. He looks at faded home movies of his father, trying to recapture his memories of the man, and then he films his son and wonders how the son will feel, some day, seeing this film. Always at his back he hears time’s winged chariot, hurrying near, and is fascinated by the way film seems to freeze time, or at least preserve it. He doesn’t really much care that his family lost an incalculable fortune to the Dukes; he is content to be who he is, doing what he does, and his motivation for making the film is not to complain, but simply to meditate on how events in the past reverberate in our own lives."
- Roger Ebert