A (Puritan) Miracle
It's come a long way - from the viral campaign on Youtube to Berlin. The global documentary LIFE IN A DAY (Berlinale Panorama) comprises glimpses of existence of its many subjects: us.
LIFE IN A DAY
It’s amazing what people can do with a single movie camera. The strange Panorama Special documentary LIFE IN A DAY (KEVIN MACDONALD, USA) springs from a very original basic idea: to record life from all around the world, registered by ordinary people. MacDonald asked participants to film people, places and things around them – anything that interested them, the moon, animals, people in their daily work – in an ordinary day chosen arbitrarily, the 24th of July, 2010. The initiative, promoted by Youtube, became immense: 80,000 submissions totalling 4,500 hours of video footage were obtained, delivered from more than a hundred countries. The length of the fragments shown is variable – they last from one second to about five minutes – and the clear intention of the filmmaker is to show the most curious, funny, sad, striking, overwhelming and plainly outstanding shortcuts obtained.
And he succeeds. Some of the pieces of this big puzzle are hilarious, others are truly emotional and some others are directly shocking. There are no titles identifying the images in front of us; we just see fragments of real life happening before our eyes. Editing was the tool that marked the range of possibilities, and the effort MacDonald made in that area was clearly enormous. A soundtrack of music from different regions harmoniously accompanies the rhythm of images, and the themes shown couldn’t be more varied. Drunkenness, happiness, love, tenderness, joy, amazement, anguish, fears, war, disease, violence, death. A guy expresses in an enthusiastic way his love for his fridge. A young man steals from a supermarket. Another tells his grandmother by phone about his own homosexuality. A father teaches his teenage son how to shave, in front of the mirror. A family feels the stroke of cancer changing its life for ever. A little girl climbs to the top of a human mountain, in a marvellous travelling shot that takes your breath away.
MacDonald mixes in some natural images as seen in “National Geographic” or on the “Animal Planet” channel – they add nothing to the movie but they are beautiful to watch. The focus is on young people and children – the old ones are a bit discriminated against – and perhaps that’s the reason why there’s so much vitality in this film.
Nevertheless, there’s a huge absence in this movie: sex. Probably because of an issue of audience and age groups, sex is absolutely avoided. There’s only one fragment that suggests sexual intercourse, but the reference is so timid that it doesn’t even count. It’s a pity that LIFE IN A DAY chose to ignore such an important part of human life.
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