Life In A Day

Director Kevin Macdonald
Released 17 June

Life In A Day could well have more camera operators than any other film. It came about when the producers, Ridley and Tony Scott, asked anyone who was interested to shoot home video footage and send it to them. There was one proviso: shoots had to be done on a single day-24 July, 2010.

Eighty thousand videos from all over the world were uploaded to YouTube, adding up to more than 4,500 hours of footage. It was down to Kevin Macdonald and his team to edit the 331 best clips into one documentary: a 95-minute montage representing the way human beings spend their time in the early 21st century.

It's a mesmerising compendium. There's cooking and praying, diving and skydiving, crying and cheering, fireworks and fire. There's a proposal, a marriage and a birth (the cameraman keels over in the delivery room). Sometimes, the snippets last just a second or two. Sometimes, Macdonald allows contributions to grow into short films: a touching monologue from an Australian man who's just had a heart operation; an American woman's "date" via Skype with her husband in Afghanistan.

If the film's composers try too hard to stress how epic it all is, the musical bombast is balanced by the director's own mischievous sense of humour. Macdonald (Touching The Void, The Last King of Scotland) is drawn to clips in which our best efforts to be dignified go awry, such as when one man recites Walt Whitman to his wife and baby twins, only for the frazzled new mum to interrupt with a heartfelt: "Stop it! It's self-indulgent! I'm tired!" The film is a magnificent anthropological study that reminds us how varied yet interconnected the world is. But it's also a bumper edition of You've Been Framed.

As it reaches its final stretch, though, and day turns to night, you start to notice what hasn't been covered. For instance, no one's doing any work that isn't agricultural. Yes, it's a Saturday, but someone somewhere must have been in an office. And what about sport? The arts? What will viewers of the future think when they don't see any museums or theatres, concerts or cinemas? More significantly, no one's seen having a conversation or sharing a joke with friends and family. In short, no one's socialising.

Macdonald is entitled to his own view about what matters in the world, but he's claimed that the film says "something fascinating about who we are as a species and what we value". And yet it seems that some of the things that we value most of all are nowhere to be seen.

Nicholas Barber