Life in a Day - A Day on Our Earth

On July 24, 2010, the production company of cult director Ridley Scott, together with the online portal YouTube, called on users around the world to capture special moments of that day on camera and upload them to YouTube. 80,000 contributions from 190 countries with a total running time of over 4,500 hours were the impressive result. Director Kevin Macdonald (State of Play, The Eagle of the Ninth Legion), his executive producer Ridley Scott, producer Liza Marshall and an intrepid team of collaborators edited together a 95-minute kaleidoscope of a day on our planet from this wealth of footage.

Life in a Day - A Day on Our Earth is a highly entertaining documentary that is at times amusing, at times moving, at times interesting and at times inconsequential, just like life itself. But it's the actually banal moments that belong to the most beautiful moments of this cinematic experiment. The quick montage of getting up in the morning or going to the toilet gives these scenes a very high entertainment value. Here it becomes particularly clear how similar people all over the world are, however different they may be in many other areas.

There were only a few guidelines for the participants in the project. For instance, YouTube users were asked to tell what they were afraid of or what they had in their pockets. Other than that, it was just a matter of telling their story. While most of the scenes are very short, some users are given more time. Even though these longer contributions, which are divided into short scenes scattered throughout the film, are also sometimes very beautiful, interesting and moving, they are also sometimes among the weaker moments of Life in a Day - A Day on Our Earth. Because some contributions seem as if they were staged by professional documentary filmmakers, which weakens the personal, simple character of the project a little.

That is admittedly only a small point of criticism, because on balance, the mammoth project can definitely be called successful. From a German point of view, the film is particularly moving, as 24.07.2010 also happened to be the day of the tragic Love Parade disaster in Duisburg, which is of course also the subject of this film. The images seen here hurt, but especially when surrounded by the rather beautiful or even trivial moments from the rest of the world, they take on a whole new intensity and show how fragile life is.

Life in a Day - A Day on Our Earth is a great documentary that shows in an entertaining way how diverse and yet at the same time how similar people are all over the world. The film also shows that something we might take for granted or consider banal in Germany takes on a very different, special meaning in another place. Greatly edited together by editor Joe Walker, this look at a day in the life of our planet is just plain fun - even if not everything is dominated by merriment, happiness and peace. Worth Seeing

An article by Frankfurt-Tipp