49 up

On October 6th, 2006, the likely final installment of the greatest and most ambitious documentary ever made will be released. Watch the trailer above.

I'm not kidding. These are some of the best, most honest films ever made. If you didn't gather from the trailer, documentarians profiled a number of childred aged of 7 for a british documentary. The first film, "7 up," is rather modest, but lays the ground work for what is to come. Every 7 years thereafter, the same documentarians visited each of the children who were still willing to be involved and filmed another documentary. That means every 7 years (7-14-21-28-35-42-49) we see a snapshot of their lives. you literally see a person grow before your eyes.

The initial question it explored was how the social status the children were born into determined their future. Sounds marxist, right? Well, as time went on, the documentary took on a life of it's own. The people in the documentary who affected by the documentary itself. Things, like life, just got a little jumbled and complex. What started as a political documentary with a definite agenda became a film about people's existential struggels, success, failure, dissapointment, and growing older.

The film's most tragic figure is that of Neil. In the first film he is the "brightest boy in his school." He had enough imagination for 5 children and was fillend with wanderlust and zeal. Responding to the question of what he thought about colored people (their wording), he reponded by something like "It's rather scary. It makes you think of a person with red beady eyes, green teath and purple skin. I don't think I like them."

At age 14 he was kind of repressed but still doing alright. At age 21 he had dropped out of university and was squatting in an abandoned house doing random construction jobs. At age 28 he was in the country jobless living on the government doles. He looked ragged and jitery, a shell of what he was before. He was clearly in the middle of a nervous breakdown. At the end of that installment you couldn't be sure if he'd still be around in another 7 years.

I need to go sleep. You should check it out. I think I'm going to buy the full series in the near future in preparation for the release.