Richard Linklater‘s Boyhood, a kind of Michael Apted-ish docudrama about the real-life journey of a boy from age 6 through 18, has been added to the 2014 Sundance Film Festival slate. Pic will screen at the Eccles on Sunday, 1.19. The film, which has been shooting in Austin at semi-regular intervals since ’02, follows the young lead, Ellar Simon, from age 6 or 7 to 18, or from kindergarten to leaving home for college. Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette play his divorced parents. The film is obviously inspired by Apted’s Up films — a series of docs that have portrayed the lives of several British kids since 1964.

Boyhood star Ellar Simon.

Hawke told Indiewire that “[after] about 20 minutes, your eyes just start tearing up and you don’t even know why. It’s about the nature of time and how it’s crashing into us all.” In another interview with Flixist, Hawke elaborated: “In just the period of a two-hour movie, you watch a human being grow up. It’s almost like watching a flower bloom in time-elapsed photography. For one minute you’re watching a six-year-old boy, and it’s so beautiful what Richard does with time: you don’t ever see him go from six to seven, to seven to eight, to eight to nine. I think it’s the greatest thing that Linklater’s ever done. It’s mind-blowing.”

Apology: When I first posted this I somehow confused Boyhood with “Youth,” the Joseph Conrad short story.