Miraculous ‘Life in a Day’ seizes the day
Documentary uses personal videos to capture a snapshot of life in 2020
A decade ago, with the recent development of smartphones putting a camera in virtually every hand, film directors Kevin Macdonald and Ridley Scott invited people to film whatever they wished on July 24, 2010. The resulting documentary, “Life in a Day 2010,” was unlike anything that had come before — a messy, poetic, diverse, globetrotting snapshot of life on our planet on a single day.
Cue up the sequel. Ten years later, cellphone camera quality has dramatically improved and new toys, such as low-cost drones, have become ubiquitous.
And, oh yeah, there’s a raging pandemic and a reinvigorated commitment to racial justice. So “Life in a Day 2020,” again directed by Macdonald and executive-produced by Scott, has a lot going on in its snapshot of life on Earth on July 25, 2020.
“Life in a Day 2020” — which made its world premiere Feb. 1 as part of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival and was made available for free on YouTube Feb. 6 — begins with women in labor, bringing new life into the world. At the crack of dawn, people awaken groggily, about to start their day. It will be a day of work and play, celebrations and funerals, birth and death. A day of friendship and family, activism and purpose.
Movingly, one woman plays a video of her son in a funny clip from “Life in a Day 2010.” Then her camera pans to an urn, where her son’s ashes are contained. He had recently died of COVID-19.
Another man, somewhere in America, is living in his car after the pandemic eliminated his job. “We are the invisible people,” says the man. “People have lost everything to this pandemic.” He worries that America will descend into anarchy.
Meanwhile, a man living in rural Siberia says, “What I fear the most is that my life will pass unnoticed.” Fear not, sir; you are preserved for eternity in this film.
So, too, is the woman in Japan whose boyfriend films their breakup (classy move, dude).
After an open call on YouTube, Macdonald and his team received 324,705 submissions in 65 languages from 192 different countries. This makes for a rich tapestry of life on Earth, but frustratingly, there are no titles to tell us where we are geographically. We know we’re watching a herder on the vast plains of Bayangol in Mongolia only because the shepherd says where he is; others aren’t as helpful.
But there are so many rich, colorful scenes that it’s a worthy watch just as an ethnographic record of our planet in a moment of time. It recalls the record of human life sent aboard the Voyager probes launched into deep space in the 1970s, a mixture of visual images and audio recordings meant to tell possible intelligent alien life about us.
The two “Life in a Day” films are even better. Here’s hoping for a follow-up in 2030 and the decades beyond.