Sundance has snuck in a few late additions to its slate (Clerks, Wish I Was Here, Lambert & Stamp) and now comes the final of these, which is also arguably the most exciting: Richard Linklater’s Boyhood. The film, also known as “The Twelve Year Project,” was shot over a dozen years (2002 to 2013) with a small cast and covers the progression from youth to adulthood of a family and, principally, the children Mason (Ellar Coltrane) and Samantha (Lorelei Linklater). The parents are played by Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette.

Linklater has for some time insisted that Boyhood would not remain the title as the film covers broader and more complex topics than this title hints at. Talking with James Ponsoldt in 2013 for Filmmaker, Linklater said:

Time is really one of the more interesting properties of cinema: the way [cinema] exists in time and how you can manipulate time, like other art forms — it’s unique to cinema. Just how the subjects themselves can age is always pretty interesting too. On Boyhood — it probably will end up not that title — I was sort of stuck. I wanted to tell a story about childhood, but there’s limitations to that, i.e., the age of the actor. You know, you can’t turn an eight year old into a 14 year old. So, I had decided to just film a little bit over time and everyone would age in it. It seemed like an interesting narrative experiment that’s unique to cinema. You could do the same thing in literature. You could do it in one sitting. It’s like a concept. But film is such a powerful record. So, without even trying, it’s just so inherent in the medium. So it just seems like there’s a lot of possibilities there that are rarely dealt with.