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Poster for Following Sean

Following Sean

The more things change, the more we're not the same

2006 · 1h 27m · Unrated Documentary
Directed by Ralph Arlyck

Seen it?

Overview

Filmmaker Ralph Arlyck first met Sean while living as a graduate student in Haight Ashbury at the height of the 1960s. The city was awash with the trappings of America’s cultural revolution-the San Francisco State University campus flooded with cops in riot gear, the Haight filled with drifters and idealists, and, on the third floor of Arlyck’s building, a come-one-come-all crashpad apartment. It was from this top floor commune that the precocious 4-year-old Sean would occasionally wander downstairs to visit and talk-and one day Arlyck turned on his camera. Sean’s casual commentary on everything from smoking pot to living with speed freaks was delivered in simple sincerity throughout the soon-to-be famous 15-minute film. This First Child of the notorious decade may have shaken the audience with his simple sentence- “Sure, I smoke pot”-but it was his barefoot impishness which would encapsulate the hope that lay in front of the nation: a promise of infinite possibility.

Director and cast

Critics on Rotten Tomatoes

Top critics, in their words

All reviews
86%
Tomatometer
Fresh

Part of the film's charm lies in its evocation of a generational mural that includes old Marxists, flower children and the progeny of red-diaper babies.

Steven Mikulan, L.A. Weekly
Fresh

What emerges from Arlyck's musings is a penetrating cinematic essay on how generations in the last century struggled to take hold of history and reconfigure the shape of daily life.

Gene Seymour, Newsday
Rotten

Arlyck spends more time following himself and his own lefty family than checking up on Sean.

V.A. Musetto, New York Post
Fresh

Ralph Arlyck's ruminative essay film picks up the trail of Sean Farrell, the former child of San Francisco hippies and the subject of his 1969 short film Sean.

Nathan Lee, New York Times
Fresh

Arlyck's compulsion is to our great fortune. Patient and elegant, his film is a quietly devastating meditation on family, work, and the unrelenting passage of time.

Drew Tillman, Village Voice

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