Release date: 2011
Genre: Documentary | Drama
My rating: ★★★
Bottom line: A creative and interesting look at what happens on planet earth in a single day.
Somebody had the idea of asking the entire world to get out their video cameras on July 24, 2010 and film themselves doing whatever it is that they do. That request resulted in Kevin Macdonald receiving 80,000 submissions and 4500 hours of footage from 192 countries, which he then cut down to a 90-minute, non-narrated film that attempts to show what it means to be a human today (as a video editor myself, I understand what a monumental task that must have been and how much respect it commands).
The film goes through life in a day – we start with people a few late-night owls awake in the middle of the night, and move on to people waking up and going through their normal routines. We follow people to their jobs, from corporate America to the farms of third world countries to people scraping to get by. We join in on happy celebrations and mourn sad losses. We meet people we would otherwise never meet, and connect with them in a way that is only possible through such a raw, visceral style of filming. Each clip pulls from the last, unknowingly creating a linear story that, in 90 short minutes, wraps up what it means to be a human living on earth in the year 2010.
