I love a good documentary. Anyone who talks to me regularly about movies knows that I’ve been working through Michael Apted’s films known as the ”Up” series, which I first heard about years ago on Siskel and Ebert but am only just now getting to see on DVD through Netflix.
In 1963, Apted assisted in making an episode of Britain’s “The World in Action” for television that focused on 14 seven-year-old children from various socio-economic backgrounds in England. The children were interviewed and shown interacting with their peers. Their feelings about everything from money to fighting to education to love are shown in their innocent and open responses. Some are funny, as you would expect answers from seven-year-olds to be, and some are heart-breaking. Apted followed up on the group 7 years later, 14 years later, and so on. The most recent film was out about a year ago, and the subjects are now about fifty years old. In this cross-section of humanity, there is illness and loss and struggle, and I find myself cheering every happiness and success that any of them have. The Jesuit maxim, “Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man,” was the premise of the first program, and it is amazing to see how much each of the participants were already at seven the people whom they would become as adults.
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5 comments:
That series has been in my queue forever. I'm glad to know it's as good as I'd hoped it would be!
That sounds really, really interesting. I love speculating about how a kid (or even myself) is going to turn out--this would be a really neat study to see on video. DRD
Going to have to see this series.
OOps, that's my Land O' Cute sign in.
I would also love to see this - it makes me think for some reason about the photographer who puts families in front of everything they own and photographs them ("Material World?").
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