“Life in a Day” – A Documentary by Everyone

The other day, Tye was ranting to me about some documentary I needed to watch. Mind you, this comes from the same guy who likes to watch really disgusting YouTube videos and documentaries on the worst drugs in the world. He also likes Star Wars a lot. So when he said that, I was thinking that it couldn’t be that great.

And then I watched it.

Tye actually has really good taste in films and the above paragraph was a little over-exaggerated. He introduced me to Life in a Day, a massive documentary project that shows clips of people’s lives all over Earth on July 24, 2010.

The film crew asked people all over the world to send in their footage of their daily lives, and they received over 4,500 hours of film. They sorted through it all and chose the most representative hour and a half and combined it to create Life in a Day. It’s so crazy to think that the entire film happened in one day! It was all shot in one single day, and everything in the movie is happening at the same time.

The movie is nothing more than the footage the team put together – no breaks or any material of any other kind. There is a short intro that consists of a few slides, but after that, it’s all raw footage. There are people eating, getting ready for their day, talking, crying, farming, working, sitting, sleeping. Just about every human activity you can imagine. One woman shows us what’s in her purse; the strangest item is the “anti-evil-eye protector.”

The most touching moment to me is when we see a boy pick up the phone to call his grandmother. He’s going to tell her that a friend of his is more than a friend; he’s scared about how his grandmother will react. “Well, he’s more than a friend, grandma.” After a few moments, we hear, “Yeah, I love you, too.” I cried because the grandmother’s reaction was so touching. At the end of conversation he says, “No, you can say ‘gay’ grandma, you don’t have to call it homosexuality.” I laughed.

The movie has gotten an eighty percent approval rate on Rotten Tomatoes, which is actually pretty high. One excerpt reads:

“The filmmakers launched a broad global search for participants, inviting anyone with a recording device to interpret with creativity, a number of from existential questions such as “What scares you?” and “What do you love the most?” All of the material had to come from one day – 24 July, 2010. The exercise became a life-altering project for McDonald and his editor Joe Walker, as they spent seven months melding 81,000 clips and 4,500 hours of footage into an emotional, humanistic representation of the planet Earth … The fruit of their labors is a wonderful film that unites the world through a single handheld camera lens. It highlights innate and ordinary ‘goodness,’ and finds a common thread in unlikely situations … But it’s best to simply ignore its corporate branding and accept the spirit of deeper understanding and celebration of the project’s intention.”

So there has been a little speculation about the film’s intentions, but I believe they are only the best. This film brings inspirational light to humanity when you wrap your head around the fact that the mother who has cancer is suffering on the same day as the couple who is dancing and in love, and they are in love on the same day a storm rolls in over a goat herd in a foreign pasture, and as the goats’ bells are clanging, a woman uses a large leaf to gather water for her child, just as another woman lies down and cries in front of the camera.

If you get the time, please watch this film. You can find the entire movie and the producers’ channel here.

What do you think of the documentary, Stylequirkers?