Ralph Arlyck's 15-minute film 'Sean' caused a media storm when it was first released in 1969. The star of the film was a bright bare-footed four-year-old called Sean who lived in the flat above Arlyck's in the centre of world hippy-dom - San Francisco's Haight Ashbury. He shocked and amazed the world when he happily declared that he liked to smoke pot, complained about the 'speed-freaks' who kept going in and out of his house and explained that he didn't like the police because they were always beating his friends up.
For the American right Sean, along with Charles Manson (who by strange coincidence lived in the house opposite for a short while) became an emblem of all that was wrong with the hippy dream. For others, however, this happy, intelligent, wonderfully free and wilfully bare-footed child became a symbol of hope for the future and proof that children didn't suffer if they weren't kept within the traditional system.
'The boy had became a symbol and it was my fault,' says Arlyck as he takes up the narrative almost 30 years later, on his way back to San Francisco so see what has become of Sean and his family.
Interestingly, however, in spite of Arlyck's worries, the adult Sean seems to regard the early film fondly, and is happy to allow the director to follow him around again. Now he appears as a well-balanced and good-humoured young man, working steadily as an electrician, but with ambitions to go to law school.
Over the next few years, as Arlyck follows him around, he marries a Russian immigrant and starts his own family, allowing Arylck to neatly tie the strings together when Sean's son himself reaches four.
As well as learning about Sean and his life, we get a fascinating insight into the rest of his family; his idealistic, hard-working communist grandparents and his drifter father. The latter, still bearded and pony-tailed helps answer the perennial question of what happens to hippies when they grow old. He is still intent on living without ties and on keeping the ideals he fostered back in Haight Ashbury.
It's not that easy, however, without medical insurance or a retirement plan. His happy care-free existence is very much dependant on the kindness of others and exasperates Sean, a product of more hard-nosed times, who is worked to the bone, but just regards such struggle as 'what you do'.
Because the first film changed Sean's life as well as reflecting it, Arylck gently questions the morality of his own role as a filmmaker, as well as showing that he too was forever altered by 'Sean'.
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