Can you crowdsource an entire feature film? Of course you can: getting a massive number of people to respond to an online call to action is the easy part. But can the result be something worthwhile? When you’ve got talented filmmakers guiding the project, as is the case with Life in a Day, you can not only get worthwhile results, but even something approaching extraordinary.
Filmmaker Ridley Scott’s production company put out the call on YouTube last year: they asked people to make videos on one day, July 24, of their daily activities, or answering questions that were provided to help spark directions for the videos. Director Kevin Macdonald, who started his career as a documentarian, winning the Academy Award for 2000’s One Day in September, before moving on to narrative features such as The Last King of Scotland, was brought on board to direct the project. He worked with two co-directors — and, one assumes, a team of viewers, to sift through over 80,000 submitted clips from 140 countries — and collaborated with editor Joe Walker to create a film that is neither haphazard collection of clips, nor is it necessarily a story, not in any traditional sense. Yet it does have the consistency of a single, cohesive work.
Part of the film’s through-line is created by sticking to a chronological structure. The film goes roughly from midnight to midnight, beginning with clips from the dark hours before dawn, ending as the day draws to a close, and punctuating many sections with montages that mark the time: the sun rising, shots of people getting out of bed, having breakfast, then lunch, then the sun setting. These quick-edited montages essentially provide the establishing shots for the longer clips that the filmmakers go to in order to slow the pace down. The film is thus edited with an eye for rhythm that’s almost musical in its approach. In fact, it takes that musical aspect literally during a brilliantly realized segment on the harvesting of food, set to a song sung my a pair of women as they pound grain into flour.
The longer scenes, some of which come back at multiple points in the film, give it some sense of narrative. There’s the single father and son in a cramped apartment, preparing for the day as they also go through the daily ritual of lighting incense at a shrine dedicated to the wife and mother who is gone. The Korean cyclist who has been travelling through 190 countries by bike for nearly 10 years, whose only wish is to see his homeland reunited. A gay man coming out to his grandmother over the phone. A fifteen year-old shaving for the first time, with the guidance of his father. Yes, there will be blood.
Many sequences are edited to show just how similar we live our lives, no matter where in the world we are, as well as clear celebrations of our differences. But if that kind of we’re-all-in-this-togetherness is a little too kumbayah for your liking, there’s are plenty of moments that put violence, tragedy and sadness onscreen. Couples fighting, a man losing his house, a cow stunned and then slaughtered. Those do tend to be in the minority, but this is, to some extent, meant to be a life-affirming exercise, so it may be an cause some eye-rolling for the resolutely cynical. The point of all this, and perhaps whether there is one at all, may depend largely on your personal reaction.
But from a purely cinematic perspective, it’s a remarkable achievement, creating something that is meaningful, sad and often funny (the father who passes out while trying to film his wife’s c-section is a particularly hilarious highlight) from the home movies of thousands of people around the world. It’s hardly a complete documentation of what it means to be human on this planet on this one particular day, and such a goal wouldn’t be possible anyway. But as a smartly-edited highlight reel, this certainly wouldn’t be a bad primer on life on earth for an outsider. For those already here, it’s an entertaining reminder that we’ve got a pretty good thing going here.
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Life in a Day
Directed by Kevin McCormick with hundreds of others
Running time: 95 minutes
Rated PG-13.
Opens today at West End Cinema.
