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FOLLOWING SEAN
Directed by: Ralph Arlyck.
Produced by: Arlyck & Malcolm Pullinger.
Camara by:.Arlyck & Tom Tucker.
Edited by: Pullinger.
Music by: Eric Neveux.
Released by: Docurama.
Country of Origin: USA. 87 min. Not Rated.
DVD Features: Sean, the original 1969 documentary. Bonus scenes. Filmmaker interview, statement & biography. Trailer.

The year is 1969, the place San Francisco, epicenter of flower power in the tune-in, dropout sixties. On a couch in a filmmaker’s Haight-Ashbury apartment sits an adorable little barefoot boy named Sean, fidgeting before the camera. “Do you turn on?” the filmmaker asks him, almost unfathomably.

The unfazed four-year-old casually replies, “I smoke grass. I eat it and smoke it.”

Q: “What do you think happens if the police find out that people smoke grass?”

A: “They get busted.”

Q: “Has a speed freak ever come to live with you?”

A: “Yes.”

Q: “How did you know he was a speed freak?

A: “Because of how skinny he was.”

Ralph Arlyck’s 14-minute-long short, Sean, caused a sensation back in that halcyon era. The London Film Festival honored it; Francois Truffaut praised it; the White House screened it to illustrate the evils happening to American youth. Ralph Arlyck made the documentary as a young film student living two floors down from the film’s subject. In the voiceover to his latest film, he states, “Sean turned out to be the perfect foil for a decade seen as infantile. [There was] lots of talk about how the Haight and this kid were exactly what was wrong with America…this little boy and his family had become a symbol, and it was my fault.”

If there was any “fault” there, Arlyck righted it, and then some, three decades later in Following Sean, his affecting 2005 sequel. More than righting any wrong, Arlyck simply shows us Sean Farrell at 31. And we marvel at the charming and self-possessed man this electrician has become, with a family of his own and a rock-solid work ethic – surely a positive comment on life’s unpredictable journey, yet not at all a negative comment on Sean’s aging-hippie father, Johnny. Back in the day, Johnny opened his Haight apartment to every drugged-out hanger-on, shuttled his son to Mexico in a converted psychedelic bus, and moved all three of his kids to a Northern California commune. Sean has changed, while Johnny, now in his 60s, still eschews steady jobs and responsibility. “Why is freedom more important to you than other people,” Arlyck asks him at one point. “I think that’s the only dance there is,” Johnny responds.

Somehow the answer is appropriate – for him. What strikes us about this sweet and thoughtful documentary is how people find their own way, their own values. Arlyck introduces us to Sean’s maternal grandparents – dedicated Bay Area communists whose labor ethic echoes more in their grandson’s life than in their son’s. Ralph’s parents, also Old Left alums, lived in a 1940s utopian community in upstate New York. But they merely toyed with that era’s dangerous radical politics, never risking their necks, as Sean’s grandfather did, by having to testify at a House Un-American Activities Committee hearing. Finally, we meet the women Sean and Ralph love – both, coincidentally, expatriates: Ralph’s wife, Elisabeth, from France; and Sean’s, Zhanna, from Russia. However, one of these two marriages seems to be over.

Multiple generations with different ideas. Multiple people with different values. If Following Sean illustrates anything, it’s that when and how we “grow up” is a very personal, very idiosyncratic process we each create in our own way. Joan Oleck
April 6, 2007