Richard Linklater films a boy and his family over 12 years.

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12 years in the life of a boy named Mason, from age 6 to 18, from boyhood to adolescence. Raised with his older sister by a single mom and with his father on the sidelines, he experiences both happiness and disillusion through his family’s divorce, marriage, moving house, as he becomes an adult over the course of the years.

Boyhood is primarily the fantastic and very ambitious project of Richard Linklater, who filmed the same actors for a few weeks every year for 12 years to tell in a realistic way the story of a boy’s relationship with his family. The success of this new movie by the director of Before Sunrise and its two sequels – also starring Ethan Hawke – mainly rests on the experience of watching actors grow old at the same tempo as their characters. Especially the main character (Ellar Coltrane), who goes through a veritable metamorphosis on camera. This dynamic gives this very long movie (2:45) a very touching and profoundly cinematographic dimension – Linklater won the Golden Bern for best director in Berlin.