Life in a Day

Festival Favorites
D: Kevin Macdonald; with thousands
of people

Here’s the first feature-length YouTube work to emerge from Google’s gilded ovipositor. The film is co-produced by Tony and Ridley Scott and directed by Kevin Macdonald – although maybe “curated and designed” is a better description. YouTube invited everyone in the world to submit videos of what was happening in their lives on July 24, 2010. Macdonald crafted the feature from about 81,000 submissions from 192 countries: 4,500 hours of footage. The result is a sort of crowdsourced Koyaanisqatsi – hardly less powerful, cumulatively, than that Godfrey Reggio epic. Time moves from midnight and along the path of an entire day, illustrated by snippets and near-vignettes of the lives of thousands, strung together in temporal (and sometimes thematic) juxtaposition until your mind’s almost boggling at the immensity of it all. Of us all. Your fellow humans. Love them, pity them, fear them: We’re all in this together, and “this” is an overflowing, contentious cauldron of life.

Saturday, March 19, 7:30pm, Alamo Lamar C

This article appears in March 18 • 2011.

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