Life in a Day 2020, 2021.
Directed by Kevin Macdonald.
SYNOPSIS:
Ten years after 2011’s Life in a Day, award-winning director Kevin Macdonald returns to present the story of another day on Earth: July 25, 2020.
Of all the movies about the COVID-19 pandemic released as of late – from exploitative speculative thrillers to a rom-com heist film starring Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor – not one feels quite as all-encompassing of the present moment as Life in a Day 2020, a follow-up to director Kevin Macdonald’s crowdsourced 2011 documentary Life in a Day.
On July 25th, 2020, the general public were invited to record and submit footage of their day, leading to 324,000 videos – comprising 15,000 hours of material – from 192 nations being received, which Macdonald and his editorial department have whittled down to an elegant, enormously affecting 90-minute montage (which releases free on YouTube on February 6th).
It goes without saying that video has taken on a whole new impetus in our lives since the July 24, 2010 setting of the first film; smartphones are now ubiquitous around the world, and videos can be posted to social media platforms within seconds. In one of this film’s hilarious early clips, a mother laments of her daughter, “This is the generation we live in, where kids go to sleep holding a cellphone.” And she’s not wrong.
The summer of 2020 feels like a particularly tumultuous nexus point for Macdonald to revisit his project, given not only the ravages of coronavirus but also the Black Lives Matter protests and the closing months of Donald Trump’s presidency. Day-to-day life may have slowed, but it certainly didn’t stop; children were born, took their first steps, and learned to ride bikes. People graduated, couples broke up, and death happened, all of which is captured with grace and aching humanity throughout.
Macdonald also posits two questions to his participants; what do you fear most?, and what would you like to change in your life? Unsurprisingly, answers vary wildly across ages and cultures, though the film’s lack of identifying intertitles for names or locations lends it an agreeably all-encompassing “we are citizens of the world” homogeneity, even while highlighting the wonderful diversity of human experience across the globe.
Courtesy of some masterful editing, Macdonald is able to pinball snappily between happiness and sadness without risking tonal whiplash. There is euphoric joy – declarations of love, make-out sessions, a couple preparing for their first sexual encounter, people going skydiving, and so on – and amusing detours to those who find pleasure in the unexpected, such as a young trainspotter obsessed with trying to spot seven trains on the same day.
Fittingly, this is matched by searing pain; a woman desperate to get pregnant receives upsetting news, a man botches his proposal, another resorts to living in his car after being left homeless by the pandemic, and countless people attempt to fight back the tides of loneliness and depression inherent in lockdown life.
Perhaps the doc’s single most crushing moment, however, concerns a devastating reunion with a young man who appeared in the original 2011 film, having succumbed to COVID-19 in early 2020 and now mourned by his mother. It caught me off-guard enough that I had to stop the film momentarily to let what I’d seen sink in.
It speaks to a general wistfulness from many subjects, reflecting on better times. The great agony of these brief windows into these lives, of course, is that the story is left to continue off the screen, the entire conceit mounted around a single glimpse into a person’s life, where we can’t know how things will pan out.
If Macdonald has stated that he didn’t set out to explicitly make a movie about the particulars of 2020, it is absolutely unavoidable. The sights of empty streets, abandoned playgrounds, and fumigated hotels never lose their shock factor, while the juxtaposition of frontline scientists working on possible vaccines against shameless anti-maskers proves absolutely galling.
The Black Lives Matter movements of last summer are also fleeting referenced, with numerous memorials to George Floyd and others killed by blue-on-black violence depicted, as well as the heartbreaking testimony of a young black woman who has lived through two of her brothers being killed in police custody.
Expertly, BLM protests are cross-cut opposite the marches of right-wing extremists, again speaking to the bravura editorial craft throughout. From an operatic opening montage of births, to a chaotic flurry of natural disasters, a fleeting tribute to “essential workers” around the world, and a much-needed dose of food porn, these snappy montages – accompanied by a wonderful score from Harry Gregson-Williams – cover just a fraction of the global experiences most of us are being denied right now.
You probably couldn’t call Life in a Day 2020 escapist as it is very much shot through the lens of a terrible ongoing world event, but it does offer a welcome window into places we cannot go at present, serving as both a salve and a reminder of what we’re all missing out on.
It’d be easy to say that the prevalence of social media makes a project like this less vital or impressive than in 2011, but if anything, a life-affirming travelogue couldn’t feel more appropriate in a year where so many feel so thoroughly bereft of hope.
No 90-minute film – nor any film, period – could do justice to the immensity of global human experience on even a single day, but Life in a Day 2020 is a remarkable snapshot of what living right now really feels like. A rare unexpected “sequel” that entirely justifies its existence, it captures humanity in all of its glee and sorrow, as proves especially poignant in this of all years.
One participant posits that the other side of coronavirus might reveal a better side of humanity, both in terms of how we treat each other and the planet, but of course, only time will tell. Here’s hoping Life in a Day 2030 might offer a similarly optimistic portrait without this edition’s monolithic asterisk.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★
Shaun Munro – Follow me on Twitter for more film rambling.
