Life in a Day

Colour, DCP
United Kingdom, 2011, 95 min
Section: Another View

Synopsis

The idea for this groundbreaking film and awesome pictorial collage surfaced in 2010 at the Sundance Institute, which was invited to take part in a worldwide cinematographic experiment. British director Kevin Macdonald proposed to film a feature-length documentary which would unfold over the course of a single day. Together the director and the film’s producer Ridley Scott (Alien, Blade Runner) decided to craft their original project using the growing popularity and appeal of YouTube: with a team of talented editors, they ultimately ended up processing 80,000 contributions coming in from 197 countries, totalling around 5,000 hours of highly personal and emotive video clips. For the first time in film history, we are given a unique documentary created from mini-stories filmed by people all over the world. The audience is thus given the chance to set out on a profoundly spiritual hour-and-a-half journey across the Planet Earth, the way it looked on July 24, 2010.

About the director

Kevin Macdonald (b. 1967, Glasgow) has won various film awards. His first feature-length offering, One Day in September, won an Oscar for Best Documentary in 2000. His second feature Touching the Void won a BAFTA for Best British Film in 2003 and went on to become the most commercially successful documentary in the history of British cinema. The director’s feature film debut The Last King of Scotland garnered a BAFTA for Best British Film and Best Adapted Screenplay, and the actor in the lead role, Forest Whitaker, won an Oscar for Best Actor. Macdonald is currently working on his next film, Eagle of the Ninth. He has written for the British papers The Guardian, The Observer and The Telegraph, and his book about his grandfather, Emeric Pressburger: The Life and Death of a Screenwriter, was named Film Book of the Year 1994 by the British Film Institute.