Michael Apted’s 49 Up aired on POV this past week. 49 Up is the seventh installment of his amazing Up series, which has chronicled the lives of a group of English schoolchildren every seven years since 1964. You can check out a photo gallery of all the participants at each age, watch excerpts from a interview between Apted and Roger Ebert and peruse some fascinating collages of world events and pop-culture moments during each year in the series by artists including Hanneke Treffers, Jamal Cyrus, Brent Rollins and Natsko Seki.
Watch clips from the film interspersed with an extended interview of filmmaker Michael Apted:
Elsewhere on the web, bloggers and journalists alike wrote about 49 Up…
Slate says that …the series remains, quite literally, irresistible” and undertakes “…the challenge of discovering a sense of integrity and of intimacy amid the flux of time and in the face of unbidden intrusions that bring fame and confusion.”
USA Today says that the Up series “…only gets better with time … because its subject, more than anything else, is time.”
Blogger J.L. Bell of Oz and Ends Blogs expresses his gratitude to the participants of the Up series, revealing that for him, “[the participants’] lives and interviews have offered such insight into what it’s like being human.”
In her blog A Cup of Tea and a Wheat Penny, blogger zan watches 49 Up and wonders about her own timeline, imagining what would have happened if someone had checked in on her life every seven years.
What about you? What would have happened if someone had checked in on your life every seven years? What were you doing at 7, 14, 21, 28…? Leave your answers in the comments!