Life in a Day

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This ambitious documentary collage attempts nothing less than a snapshot portrait of life on Earth on 24 July 2010, edited down from over 80,000 clips submitted by YouTube contributors - a hefty 4,500 hours of material. Taking up the challenge, director Kevin Macdonald (Touching the Void, The Last King of Scotland) and his heroic editor Joe Walker have shaped their movie around the notion of what an average day unfolding around the globe is like, starting with sundry breakfast rituals and whisking us here and there, so we never know quite what's coming next. The result is witty, poignant, unexpected: all humanity is here, from birth to death, joy to sadness, delivered in fragments that give us a brief but illuminating glimpse into the varied experiences of others. True, the overbearing music sometimes feels like its massaging our emotions, but while the film-makers could have come up with some bland "family of man" conclusion, Life in a Day has the integrity never to cop out on the extremes of wealth and poverty that divide us - as well as the showmanship to remain thoroughly entertaining throughout.