“Life in a Day”, a documentary compiled from footage sent to YouTube, celebrates a shared humanity... About 4,500 hours of footage taken on July 24th 2010 were submitted to the project as 80,000 clips from 190 countries. Some cameramen were seeking to provide insights into their lives or the lives of others, to impress the world of film or just have a bit of fun and the chance to win a ticket to the Sundance film festival—which agreed to show the finished project without any sense of how it might turn out.
Inevitably, the film-makers chose to focus on human universals: sleeping, waking, breaking fast, laughing, crying, talking and so on. Another part comes simply from finding the genuinely affecting: an American boy’s reluctance to be part of a family video project built around his mother’s fight with cancer; a Japanese widower’s morning routine in his messy apartment; a teenager’s mix of exhaustion, anxiety and hope.
Read more at The Economist
