In 1964, director Michael Apted interviewed a group of seven-year-old British schoolchildren for a BBC television documentary called “7 Up”. He has since returned to film these subjects every seven years.

This is my all-time top doc, perhaps because it follows the stories of these varied lives, throughout their lives, in real time. Like Ebert says:

“I think it’s the most noble use of film that I’ve been able to witness as a filmgoer. Noble in its simplicity and its honesty and its directness and its lack of pretension or grandiosity.”

And as Laura says:

“The editing can drag or feel very redundant if you watch them back to back, but the life insight is worth it.”

Someday, someone will tie all the footage together and make a grand summary film without the revisiting repetition of the individual releases. Until then, we still have a valuable set of gems.