by Jessica Schneider

Created on: July 09, 2009

'Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man.'

-Jesuit Proverb

This is the motto behind The Up Series. And if there is one film series you should force yourself to watch, The Up Series would be it. Directed by Michael Apted, I speak from experience: once you start it, you won't stop till finished. For over a year now, my husband has been telling me to 'Watch the Up series' and because it is a film that runs probably close to 700 minutes, I've been putting it off. Finally, I watched the first two DVDs, (which cover ages seven and fourteen) and by the end of the next two days, I'd watched all seven.

This documentary is about the lives of fourteen children who, in 1964 were filmed at the age of seven, and have since been filmed each seven years since. The last film made was in 2005, and it was 49 up, where all the 'kids' are now 49. The next film will be '56 up' but that won't be out till 2012.

Basically, the reason you should watch this series is to see how real life people change over the years. By watching, you grow with them. So you see them as the bubbly seven year olds, to the awkward, one-word answering fourteen year olds, to the lingering pimple days of twenty-one, and so on.

But also it is a series that is 'uplifting' in the true sense of the word, not in the mawkish, Hollywood sense. The reason for this is because you realize, that by watching, how life always changes. That is the one thing that it is inevitable. And although this might seem a trite and rather obvious revelation, I do believe that if more people realized this, that there would be as much less depression and suicides as there are.

Part of the reason people want to kill themselves is because they believe there is no way out, that things will always be as they are, that they will always feel this way. In this series, you will watch these people go through marriages, kids, divorce, parent's deaths, job struggles, to even one guy who becomes homeless for a time (he's homeless at twenty-eight but no longer when he's thirty-five).

It will also force you to examine your own life, and think how you were like at these seven-year intervals. The concept for the film is the idea that by seven years of age our character is already mapped out. Thus each series ends with the Jesuit proverb: 'Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man.'

It's fascinating to watch these people at seven and see how in later years those early observations they made at seven were the seeds for something that would later arise.

The film company's intent in filming these seven year olds was to show the British class systems, and how one's life is planned out based upon what class one is born in. So Apted interviewed rich public school kids, orphans, poor working class kids from the East End of Britain, country kids, middle classers from Liverpool, private schoolers, and so on.

By the end, I had almost developed a British accent because that's all you hear. Once you watch 7 up and then 14 up, you'll be hooked and want to see what they look like at 21, and so on. So check it out sometime. I can't encourage it enough. You'll find it fascinating.

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