Turning the camera once more on his southern heritage after his breakthrough film, Sherman's March, Time Indefinite catches McElwee contemplating family heritage and mortality on the cusp of middle-age. Starting with his marriage proposal to his sound recordist and moving through a series of unexpected family tragedies, the film is one of McElwee's most melancholic works. Fatherhood – the anxiety of raising a child of one's own and the imprint of McElwee's father on his life – looms large in the film, serving as catalyst for an exploration into the inescapable persistence of the past onto the future. How we contemplate and come to terms with time, is in many ways McElwee's main theme here, and with his understated black humor and sharp attention to all the diverse quirky figures he meets on a daily basis, Time Indefinite is the type of diaristic cine-poem only he can produce.