Armed with a 16mm camera and a grant to make a documentary about the lingering aftermath of William Tecumseh Sherman's 1864 march to the sea, Ross McElwee gets sidetracked. After his girlfriend breaks up with him, Ross shifts his attention from the historical to the personal, to the battlefield of modern love, and embarks on a sociological chronicle that documents the courting rites and rituals of the New South. A generous and humanistic portrait of several remarkable women that Ross meets along the way, Sherman's March sketches its characters with novelistic sensitivity: Pat, an aspiring actress with a yen for
