The result of McElwee turning his camera on his family and their neighbors, the film is a humorous and poignant look at odd moments in a genteel Southern town.

"Backyard is equal parts Samuel Beckett, Jean-Luc Godard and Werner Herzog." - Boston Globe

"For the past twenty-five years, Ross McElwee has given new meaning and flair to first-person non-fiction cinema. Always wise and irreverent, ever the unreliable narrator, McElwee makes the grandest themes of human comedy his artistic province: love and death, chance and fate, memory and denial, the marvelous and the appalling." - The Museum of Modern Art

"Accept no imitations: A film by Ross McElwee could be made by no other. Since his hilarious autobiographical breakthrough, Sherman's March, the profound artist-philosopher has been using his own life as a springboard to examine humankind's biggest issues, and tiniest. McElwee makes movies the way life might, ideally, be lived."
- Entertainment Weekly