Life in a Day 2020 (2021)
February 3, 2021 9:46 AM - Subscribe

Putting out a global call, documentarist Kevin Macdonald asked people to document their lives on July 25th and send him the footage.

Ten years after Macdonald released the documentary "Life in a Day" he returns to document what a day looks like in 2020 for people across the globe. After editing submissions from over 300,000 people, Macdonald presents the viewer with a 90 minute tightly edited film composed of those submissions.
posted by miss-lapin (1 comment total)
 
The part of this project I enjoyed the most was the weirdness people got up to in order to cope with covid like the man who named the spiders living in his house. Unfortunately, with so many submissions you don't really get a lot of context so, for example, the young couple that finds out their efforts to get pregnant have failed-Macdold spends more time with them, but it's out of place. It's not enough time to really give us an arc, but it's more time than just having a moment of genuine grief when they find out.

Nowhere is this failure felt more than when we are presented with a then and now of one of the subjects of the 2011 documentary "Life in a Day." We watch along with a woman a segment of the documentary with her and her son. She then says "And here is my son today" and she pans to an urn. Her son died of covid a few months earlier. Especially considering that this is a subject from the first film, I wanted the filmmaker to go deeper in at that moment. Unfortunately he slid onto the next clip.

The film was introduced at Sundance as essentially the penultimate covid film as the way it was made reflects the very phenomena it wishes to document: how we have changed (and how we have not changed) our lives because of covid. And it's true, the problem of the film is part of the major problem with covid: there's an overwhelming amount of things to be processed but not a cohesive framework to help with that.

Despite all this, it's definitely worth watching. It will be available on Youtube on February 6th.
posted by miss-lapin at 9:54 AM on February 3, 2021


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