49 up
(DVD)

Documentary.

Special features: Roger Ebert interview with Michael Apted (2006) (29 min.); Filmmaker biography [text feature]; Photo gallery [slide show]; Trailer gallery (9 min.); First Run Features [text feature].

Photography, George Jesse Turner ; editors, Ian Brown, Kim Horton ; 7 Up directed by Paul Almond, researched by Michael Apted, Gordon McDougall.

Host, Michael Apted ; interviews with, Bruce Balden, Jacqueline Bassett, Symon Basterfield, Andrew Brackfield, John Brisby, Suzanne Dewey, Charles Furneaux, Nicholas Hitchon, Neil Hughes, Lynn Johnson, Paul Kligerman, Susan Sullivan, Tony Walker.

Originally broadcast in the UK as a documentary television special on September 15 and 22, 2005.

Inspired by the Jesuit saying, "Give me a child until he is 7 years old, and I will give you the man," in 1964 Granada Television commissioned a short documentary wherein producers profiled 14 7-year-old children, and loosely speculated on what sort of lives they might lead. It was meant and received as an indictment of the British class system, which seemed most inflexible in 1964. Almost as an afterthought, director Michael Apted--a researcher on the original documentary--returned to profile these same 14 subjects at seven-year intervals. Over the decades, Britain has changed unutterably, the class system has partly melted, and the films themselves have become something else entirely. The "7 up" series has been called the grandfather of reality television, and as a whole reminds viewers what we all know: that every so-called ordinary life is a zone of great drama and tremendous risk.

DVD; NTSC.

Closed-captioned.