Documentaries that create a new reality. Fiction that tells the truth. Personal projects, made with our favorite brands and beloved clients. Produced and directed by Rudolf McClain in Napa Valley, California.
A two-continent love letter to a single grape with two names. From the granite slopes of the Rhône to the red dirt of the Barossa, Que Syrah, Shiraz follows the winemakers, growers, and drinkers who keep asking the same old question in a dozen different languages: is it the same wine — or two different souls?
From the director of Merlove.
The film that started it all. After a single line of movie dialogue nearly killed Merlot in America, Rudolf McClain went looking for the winemakers who never stopped believing. Merlove is an unapologetic love letter to an unfairly maligned grape — and the stubborn, romantic people who keep planting it.
Official Selection: Sonoma International · Paso Robles Digital Film Festival · Festival Oenovideo.
Since 2008, Famed Wolf Pictures has been hired by wineries, estates, and institutions to tell the stories only a filmmaker can tell. Not advertisements. Not content. Small documentaries, often under five minutes, made with the same camera and the same eye as the features.
I started Famed Wolf Pictures because wine deserves better than advertising. It deserves cinema. A glass of Merlot is a choice somebody made about soil, weather, patience, and risk — the same raw material as any good documentary.
For almost two decades I've pointed a camera at the people who make wine, and at the people who love it back. Sometimes that's a feature-length film like Merlove. Sometimes it's a five-minute portrait for a Napa Valley estate that just wants their founder to be remembered the way she actually was. Either way, the rules are the same: no talking heads unless they have something to say, no b-roll that doesn't earn its place, no music telling you how to feel.
If your story is worth filming, it's worth filming like a film.
Rudolf McClain, Director— Fin —
If you'd like to book a screening, share your story in a documentary, lend your location to a film or streaming show, or commission a project of your own — the director answers his own mail.
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