Just watched an awesome film this weekend, brought to you by National Geographic, called “Life in a Day.”
“What happens when you send a request out to the world to chronicle, via video, a single day on Earth? You get 80,000 submissions and 4,500 hours of footage from 192 countries. Producer Ridley Scott and Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald took this raw material — all shot on July 24, 2010 — and created Life in a Day, a groundbreaking, feature-length documentary that portrays this kaleidoscope of images we call life.”
Amazing. I’d never been so captivated just watching footage after footage of all these people from different corners of the earth, whose names, languages, and countries are all unknown to the viewer, whose borders dissolve to form a truly global, human vision. So often our reality is singular, and we forget that life is a conglomerate of all these realities, that when we first open our eyes in the morning, someone else on the opposite end of the world is putting out the light. The film presents the different rhythms we live by, our fears, griefs, loves, our material possessions, the spaces we occupy. All of this in just one day of existence!
At the end, a girl who is driving home in a dark rainstorm says: “I filmed myself today expecting something great was going to happen. And even though nothing great happened…it did.” The movie of our lives isn’t a story, it’s a collection of mundane moments in a day that we hardly give importance to. After watching this film, every step I took became colossal.
mabel lee 