Synopsis:
Shot on a single day in 2010, Life In A Day is a unique user-generated documentary, enlisting a global community to capture a moment in their lives on camera. Over 4500 hours of footage have been edited to show what life is like on Earth today.
Director Kevin Macdonald stated that Life In A Day is the first user-generated feature film and it has a unique distribution plan, being distributing by a cinema chain. The problem is, it’s not a feature film. It’s not being distributed traditionally because it’s not a conventional film. That would be fine if it was a cinematic montage as I imagined it to be. However, it’s not at all cinematic, it is a very televisual documentary.The problem with splicing together a couple of minutes footage from countless users is you don’t actually care about any of the people because there is no character development at all. Although the idea was to give a window into the lives of an eclectic multitude of people, all this really shows is that a lot of people’s lives are very boring and those that give monologues are actually quite pretentious. I was expecting Life In A Day to be one of two things. Either a glimpse into the lives of some interesting characters, who live in fantastical, visually spectacular locations which serves to be an inspirational, life-affirming piece or a brutally realistic insight into the lives of people who live in devastating conditions, much as Slumdog Millionaire did. But Life In A Day does neither. There are undoubtedly some moral and social commentaries going on with the juxtaposition of an American army wife and an Afghani peasant for example, the problem is by the time you get to them, you’re so bored you just don’t care.
There is quite a bit of graphic animal slaughter for a 12A and frankly if I wanted to watch somebody make goat’s cheese, I’d go to a craft fair.
