LG, Scott Free Productions, YouTube
Cindy Baer, Moica, Caryn Waechter, Hiroaki Aikawa, David Jacques, Bob Liginski Jr., Drake Shannon, Ester Brymova, Cec Marquez, Christopher Brian Heerdt
Saturday July 24, 2010. The request was put to filmmakers all over the world to film and submit life on July 24th, 2010 and you get over 80,000 submissions and over 4,500 hours of footage. The editors then trimmed this down to a little over an hour and half. What you have left is a montage of events large and small all around the world in a single day. From births and deaths to weddings and vacations, mundane things to world shaking events. Life in a Day is all that but much, much more.
This is an interesting concept for a documentary. It’s very beautifully done, and the music is very soothing. We get a feel for lots of different cultures. Some of it is very ugly, but most of it is remarkably beautiful. They divide the movie up into different segments, noted by a young lady holding up a sign saying something like, “What do you love”, or “What are you afraid of”, and so forth. This takes all the different views of a similar subject and bunches them together to make is seem less chaotic. Starting with those awake in the middle of the night in the wee hours, getting up for work, or whatever starts their day, to the very end just a few moments before midnight when a young lady is telling us that she waited all day long for something momentous to film, and nothing happened. Her ruminations on the ordinary nature of her day wraps it up beautifully. There is no narration and no talking over the film. The characters filmed speak in their own languages, of course, and we get subtitles for the things not in English, but it isn’t preachy or trying to set an agenda. It’s just a gorgeous look at one day on this big blue marble we call Earth. I enjoyed it. I think some other similar films were perhaps a bit better. The Disney Earth Day films for example, are probably better. The one about the babies is also very good. But this is definitely an interesting piece of film work, and well worth watching if you are interested in seeing a single day on Earth.
EdG – EdsReview Dot Com – A Movie Review Blog
