The events of peoples' lives on that date, all over the globe -- events both ordinary and extraordinary -- are captured in Life in a Day, a collaborative effort from filmmakers in 190 counties to create a time capsule of human activity. Edited down from 4,500 hours of submitted footage, Life in a Day is a free-wheeling look at human events that takes in everything from the mundane to the exhilarating. (The mundane rather more than the exhilarating, but never mind.) The overall sense of the project appears to be: It's good to be alive.
A lot of it is predictable. Here are humans waking up, whether they sleep in parks or tents or houses, and here they are having a wash, a pee, a shave and brushing their teeth. There's breakfast to be cooked (lots of eggs all over the world), coffee to be brewed, kids to be seen to, gods to be worshipped.
Here's a sequence on babies getting born, including an endearing moment when the videographer/dad faints in the delivery room. The births include human babies, chicks, new giraffes. Children play in the park. A hospital patient is glad to have survived. Fireworks explode in the sky in several different countries. People go to work, drive, get married, grow food, make food, eat food, display their symbols of wealth, religion or success. It's all familiar, for the most part, and it's all mildly interesting.
More interesting are the sequences that fully engage a viewer emotionally. A Korean cyclist talks about riding his bike all over the world, and about what he's learned in his years on the road. A young man on the phone tells his grandmother he's gay. People list the contents of their pockets and pocketbooks, and talk about the things they love. The dark side of life isn't ignored; there are disturbing sequences, such as an animal slaughter, for example, and some footage from the Love Parade tunnel tragedy at Duisburg.
Life in a Day is the result of a YouTube general call for people to send in a video that showed their life on July 24, 2010. Ridley Scott and Tony Scott are the executive producers of the project. The film follows the clock, so to speak, moving from morning to midnight, but it otherwise has little structure and moves happily from person to person, all over the world.
According to the film, there are things that divide us as humans, but far more things that unite us. Lucky again. More Movie Reviews
