35 Years in the Life

Episode 1
A brash young separatist intent on seeing an independent Quebec and a pair of Anglo architects in Quebec who would flee the province's turmoil for a career in the US.

Episode 2
A star of '60s Canadian variety TV who would drop out and sail the Caribbean and a Newfoundlander who travelled to Africa, ended up in Ottawa, and is still looking to fill a dream.

Episode 3
Enterprising hippies whose farm communes would fall victim to the vagaries of love, sex and fractiousness.

Episode 4
Farmers who started out with no electricity in northern BC still have no electricitiy 35 year later and a Jamaican immigrant torn between facing racism head-on in a vibrant Toronto and toiling in relative anonymity in a Northern Ontario mine.

Episode 5
The last of the line takes on the tradition of keeping the light at the entrance to the St. John's harbour and a political activist whose drive would see him elected premier of BC before crashing into a wall of disillusionment.

What a difference

half a lifetime makes

In the late 1960's, CBC TV launched a groundbreaking series called Five Years in the Life. Innovative and stunningly forward-thinking, it profiled ordinary and not-so-ordinary young people living their lives in the electric millieu of Canada in the Trudeaumania years. Its mission: to return five years later to follow up on each subject's hopes and dreams. In total, 42 families saw their lives captured on film. Only a handful were revisited five years later before the series was cancelled and banished to the vaults of CBC's archives.

But while the series gathered dust, its fleshandblood subjects continued to eat, sleep, breathe, create, procreate, stumble, fall and succeed – reflecting in microcosm the shifting fortunes of Canada as it redefined itself in the late 20th Century.

35 Years in the Life explores what happened to some of those families in a compelling five-part documentary series that reflects the psyche of the century's most idealistic generation, amid dreams both shattered and realized.

35 Years in the Life was directed, written and co-executive produced by Bill Kendrick of Island Images Inc. Richard Games of Salt Water Communications Inc., was cinematographer, editor and also co-executive producer.