The other evening while scrolling for movies to watch I came across Following Sean, a documentary about filmmaker Ralph Arlyck, reconnecting with Sean Farrell, his subject from a short documentary he had made thirty years before in 1969, when Sean was 4 years old. The premise of that documentary, called Sean, was following and interviewing Sean in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in 1969. In that documentary we see the camera following a barefoot Sean walking around the Haight with intercuts of an interview with Sean where he admits, among other things, to smoking and eating grass. Sean and his family had lived a few floors above Mr. Arlyck and he thought Sean would be a great subject for his film thesis at San Francisco State University. In Following Sean, released in 2005, we meet up with Sean in his early 30’s and get some background on his family's history and where they are today as well as Ralph’s family history and present day life. I did not expect that Following Sean would have had a very profound effect on me.
