Life in a Day (film)
Last year, YouTube asked users to contribute videos of a day in their lives. 'Tell us your story, tell us what you fear and show us what you have in your pockets,' was the basic guideline. And it had to be shot on one day: July 24, 2010.
Director Kevin Macdonald and his team sifted through more than 80,000 submissions, totalling 4,500 hours of footage from 192 countries, creating, perhaps, the largest user-generated feature film the world has ever seen.
Life in a Day runs loosely from midnight to midnight, with each clip placed in relation to the part of the day it was shot. The film is made up of footage spliced together to form one 90-minute montage covering everything you'd expect - and a lot you wouldn't - in a documentary about 24 hours of life.
The film provides a glimpse into the varied lives of citizens of the globe. But it's not all everyday occurrences: there's footage of people and animals giving birth; a couple exchanging wedding vows; a father-and-son moment as a teenager shaves for the first time. Perhaps the most gut-wrenching moments comes from the Love Parade stampede in Germany, in which 21 people died.
What you take away from the film is that, despite how different our lives are, in the end, we're all similar. Life is ordinary, existence is unheroic. Life in a Day is realism at its finest.
