Steve Wax

Following Sean -- What happens to a 4-year-old kid who grew up smoking pot and running barefoot on the wild streets of 1960s San Francisco?

Following Sean -- Thirty years, three generations, and a lifetime later, award-winning filmmaker Ralph Arlyck returns to San Francisco in search of Sean, the boy who was the subject of his controversy-sparking 1969 documentary.

What happens to a 4-year-old kid who grew up smoking pot and running barefoot on the wild streets of 1960s San Francisco? In Following Sean, a magical blend of deeply intriguing personal narrative and street-level investigation, filmmaker Ralph Arlyck tracks down Sean--the boy who had been the subject of his controversy-sparking 1969 documentary--to find out what he's like 30 years later. As the offspring of Communist grandparents and free-wheeling Haight-Ashbury parents, the smart and appealing grown man whom Arlyck finds uncorks a fascinating rumination on the unpredictability of life. The film captures subtle, profound scenes of Sean's beautiful Russian wife, his aging but still 60s-inspired father, his feisty Lincoln Brigade grandmother, and weaves these stories into the filmmaker's reflections on his own 60s encounters and his current New York life. In visiting multiple family generations--with their radically different ideas about work, responsibility, and freedom--Following Sean movingly probes the big questions with which we all grapple.

A child's perspective on the Haight-Ashbury counterculture of the 1960s informs filmmaker Ralph Arlyck's film concerning the perceptive and precocious four-year-old and his unique perspective on the chaos that was sweeping a nation. A student at San Francisco State University at the time when police in riot gear flooded the campus and revolutionary-minded idealists waxed poetic in the streets, Ralph Arlyck was befriended by a young boy named Sean who would occasionally come down from his mother's top-floor apartment to chat with the various inhabitants of the come-one-come-all commune.