Following Sean

• Sean Farell
• Johnny Farrell, whose father
• Susie, whose mother
• Hon Brown, Sean's grandmother
• Zhanna, Sean's wife
• Elisabeth Cardonne, Arlycks woman
• Arlycks parents

Following Sean is a documentary of the U.S. filmmaker Ralph Arlyck from 2005, at the center Arlycks 1969 short film Sean is incurred.

Background of the film

Following Sean introduces Sean Farrell, the Arlyck had portrayed in 1966 in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury hippie district. Ralph Arlyck, who looked more at the edge of this scene, " could not identify with the advocates of the free life itself. He was more observer than revolutionaries and used his camera to document life around. The visits by Sean, who lived in his house inspired Ralph to make a short film about the little rascals, the barefoot flitted through Haight Ashbury, because he was scary shoes and was afraid of the speed freaks ".

In this fifteen-minute work, which established Arlyck as part of his film studies at Colgate University, he showed the four -year-old Sean Farrell sitting in his wanderings through the neighborhood and on the sofa as interviewee. On Arlykcs questions he expresses his childish opinions on Marijuana, the speed freaks, police operations and the lifestyle of the people around him. Arlyck mounted in this interview sequences his cinematic portraits of that hippie culture; in off he tells the rest of the story of the film, after he had even left San Francisco.

Sean's revealing stories of his personal experiences stoner made ​​the documentary known in one fell swoop; the movie had a performance at the White House and was apostrophized of the public to a document of the moral decay of the former United States.

The finished film titled Sean was a great success and ran to many festivals and in theaters. Even François Truffaut commented on Arlycks film appreciation ( Sean's truly a kid of our modern times), when he went to the film festival of Cannes in competition and knighted him so abruptly as film artists.

25 years later, Ralph Arlyck, who long ago moved away from San Francisco and filmmaker, to Sean and recalled their time together. He finally wonders what became of the little boy and tries to find him, meets his parents and eventually Sean itself after the first tentative contacts again developed a friendship between Sean and Ralph and in the following decade, a new film that Sean's life portrayed, ending in time, as well as Sean's son, Alex, is four years old.

Plot and themes of the film

The film student Ralph Arlyck lived in 1969 in a small apartment in the Cole Street San Francisco; its neighbors are Janis Joplin, Charles Manson and the little Sean Farrell with his family. His parents are dropouts who make their apartment, two floors above Arlyck to a scene meeting place. Sean is four years old, Ralph visited regularly and he tells him of his wanderings and his attitude to life. " Sean's parents were hippies. They gave him all the freedom and had nothing against Sean even smoked a joint. "

Here, the director of the Off tells far more of themselves than of Sean - even if he Sean tracking the early 1990s, the infected now in his 30s, and even when he accompanied his marriage with a young Russian woman and the birth of his son - it 's always his own past, the relationship with his parents and the ambivalent relationship to that culture of free love, of which he had so fascinated reported in its original Sean documentation, we talked about here. The voice of the filmmaker speaks continuously from the off; she talks about how the director is considered as a young man after Haight- Ashbury, how he met Sean and his parents and how he was both attracted and repelled by the charm of that era.

In addition to the film's characters are the members of Sean's family, his father Johnny Farrell, who got out in the late 1950s from his banker family, his wife Susie, who came from a family of members of the Communist Party; finally Arlycks own wife Elisabeth Cardonne, a young French woman, who he met in Haight Ashbury and her two sons.

A secondary line of action portrayed Sean's grandparents, who were important trade unionists and members of the Communist Party in the 1950s. Archival shows Archie Brown, as he protested for Un-American Activities in San Francisco at his treatment before the Committee. Another side issue, the stresses that can occur in cross-cultural marriages.

Critics votes

Katja silver tooth wrote in dokumentarfilm.info:

Benjamin Happel wrote film reviews:

Cheryl Eddy wrote in the San Francisco Bay Guardian:

Soundtrack of the film

For the film and Others Music from San Francisco was selected as described by Kelley Stoltz, Joanna Newsom and coachwhips.