Trailer Released for '63 Up,' Latest in Michael Apted's Remarkable Project Tracking Group of British People Across Decades

First film in series, 7 Up!, premiered in 1964

Imagine documenting a group of people from the age of seven up to 63, their childhoods, young adulthoods, maturity and coming of age. What insights could be gained about individual destinies against the backdrop of societal forces? This has been the project of the Up series of documentaries directed by Michael Apted over the course of decades (the first film in the series, 7 Up!, was directed by the late Paul Almond).

The documentaries "strike me as an inspired, even noble, use of the film medium," Roger Ebert noted in a 1998 review of 42 Up. The latest film in the series, 63 Up, which finds the group of subjects nearing retirement age, opens in New York November 27 and in LA December 6, with a nationwide expansion on December 13.
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The subjects are good sports... They accept that they're part of an enterprise larger than themselves: Their films exploit, more fully than any others, the use of cinema as a time machine.

--Roger Ebert, in a 1998 review of 42 Up

"The original 7 Up was broadcast as a one-off World in Action Special inspired by the founding editor Tim Hewat’s passionate interest in the Jesuit saying, 'Give me the child until he is seven, and I will give you the man,' and his anger at what he saw as the rigidity of social class in England," according to a press release announcing the new trailer. "This groundbreaking documentary anthology has now reached 63 Up, gaining further illuminating insight into its premise of asking whether or not our adult lives are pre-determined by our earliest influences and the social class in which we are raised."

Watch the new trailer here: