21 UP AMERICA

DOCUMENTARY, US, 2006, 99 minutes


Director: Christopher Quinn

Producer: Victoria Bippart
Victoria Bippart in attendance

Modeled on the famed British documentary series by Michael Apted, this is the third installment of an ambitious and fascinating project that chronicles the lives of 16 Americans by filming them every seven years as they grow from childhood to adolescence to adulthood. The subjects range from privileged New York Upper Eastsiders to residents of Chicago’s most infamous public housing project to middle-class suburbanites to children of the Midwest farm belt. At 21, they are barely adults, but the choices they make now about education, jobs, marriage and parenthood may well determine the rest of their lives. Director Christopher Quinn has an excellent rapport with all these young men and women, and he adroitly weaves clips from the two earlier films to show us that the course of someone’s life is never entirely predictable. (Amy Taubin)

Victoria Bippart’s relationship with the American Up kids goes back to the inception of the Peabody Award-winning series. Her other producing credits include LONDON CALLING, an A.C.E. award-winning, 12-part series about English pop culture. Directing credits include two episodes of the award-winning series THE HISTORY OF ROCK AND ROLL; PHISH; and a film about Dan Kiley, America's first "modern" landscape architect. Bippart is an instructor at M.I.T.’s Media-Lab, where she helped develop the first interactive video journal.