If ever a film was unique it is Kevin Macdonald's Life in a Day, given its European premiere to a packed Berlin Festival audience. The facts speak for themselves. It is woven together from more than 4,500 hours of footage sent from 192 different countries via YouTube on July 24 last year. It is an incredible feat of editing which could clearly have resulted in 100 different movies.
Whether you think this version is a film of the year or a hotchpotch of good, bad and indifferent is entirely up to the watcher. But if the audience at Berlin has anything to do with it, the former opinion may well prevail. They gave it an ovation.
Aided by Ridley and Tony Scott, Macdonald and his editors have certainly fashioned something which has the qualities of both documentary and fiction. Occasionally, someone holds up a placard asking "What do you most fear?" or "Who do you most love? Macdonald says the question "What makes you laugh?" was tried but produced only dull answers. Generally, though, we just see people either talking to the camera or going about their daily lives.
It is generally the poor or the middle class we see. There is a slightly odd absence of the rich and powerful, possibly because they don't even know what YouTube is, or because they give away their secrets much less easily than the rest of us. Yes, there are dull patches despite the skilful editing. But there is a general feeling that somehow or other the world on that particular day encapsulated was amazing but not exceptional.
Life in a day
