28th December, 2011

DAVID ADAMS

It took me a while to get around to watching Life in a Day even though I always suspected it would be a movie I should see. It didn’t disappoint.

LIFE IN A DAY: The Life in a Day YouTube channel

Life in a Day is the result of a project - a joint production effort between Ridley Scott’s production company and YouTube - in which people from around the world were invited to video a day in their life – the 24th July, 2010 - and then submit the results to create a documentary which would show life on earth for a single day.

Some 80,000 clips were submitted and these were culled and collated to produce an hour–and-a-half of documentary footage which was then first aired at the Sundance Film Festival last January. As well as being released in cinemas and on DVD, it's now also available for download free-of-charge on its website.

The resulting footage is organised both according to the time of the day and thematically – there’s a series of clips on eating breakfast, for example, another on love and what that means for people, and another on what people most fear.

Essentially, it’s all about stories. There’s the Australian man who's recovering in hospital from a major heart operation, the Korean who’s cycling around the world in a bid to help reunite his country, the farmers making Bryndza cheese somewhere in central or eastern Europe, the photographer who lives in Kabul.  There’s the little boy who shines shoes for a living, the little girl who performs in a human pyramid, the man who apparently shoplifts a sandwich, the US soldiers who dance.

There are stories here to amuse, to inspire, to make you weep, to cause you to cringe; stories to outrage and to simply enjoy. This is life in all its beauty and ugliness, its banality and oddity. Take the time to have a look and prepare to be confronted, moved and amazed.

If a passage from a book or a song or something else altogether has particularly inspired or amazed you, why not share it with others in Wow! Email your contributions to wow@sightmagazine.com.au.

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