SPOILER
ALERT: If you haven’t watched “Life in a Day” please do watch it before you
read this. You can watch it online in Youtube officially for free.
It’s one
amongst a revolutionary concept that triggers and paves the gateway to the next
generation in film making. The Inception for this project happened by Kevin
MacDonald’s idea, supported by YouTube community and produced by Ridley Scott. “Life
in a Day” is a crowd-sourced documentary film that was shot on a single day
(July 24th 2010, Saturday). It was filtered and edited over 80,000
videos that were submitted from the contributors around 192 countries with a
runtime of 4,500 hours. The movie debuted in Sundance Film festival and its streamed live online officially.
I specifically
watch some movies for their catchy titles. If such titles carry the word “Life”
in it, I will definitely fall for it. Apart from “Life in a Day”, Some of the best
titles that I’d watched mainly for the keyword ‘life’ is Tree of Life, Life is
beautiful, Lives of others, Life of David Gale, Waking Life, The Double life of
Veronique and the classic, It’s a wonderful Life. This big list includes Godfrey
Reggio’s Qatsi trilogy
too, but pardon me I haven’t watched it still.
The soul of
a documentary film is well perceived and experienced by the observer with its music
blending and traveling along with the characters. It should sound as a theme
that represents the state of the character’s mind and beats of the heart. Harry Gregson-Williams and Matthew
Herbert composed such B-E-A-UTIFUL tunes for these powerful video frames.
The movie explores the unidentified loop amongst various phases
of life, with its spectacular comparison of a day’s dawn to dusk with the life’s
birth to death. Just like myths, dreams, reality, relationships, love, pain and
ailment, a day has its own unique ups and down. The film opens with early day
footage of a lady feeding a baby, an old woman explaining about her myth, drunken
person blabbering in a hangover. It then gives a quick glimpse at the
characters and their lives we are going to view about in a major portion, followed
by the wake-up scenes across various geographies in different styles. The
regular early morning sessions of a day like freshening up, breakfast and
reading newspaper are covered in linear fashion. It’s simply brilliant.
The narration then jumps to portray the essence and
importance about the birth of a creature. Amongst all the lovely tracks I loved
the track “A day In a Time”. It still plays like a sweet lullaby in my ears. It
stands as a theme for the ever-good rich parts i.e. for the HD shots
representing the lives of people living in higher society.
Following by the scenes of people telling about what they do
carry regularly, the musical track then slides down to country folk song, sung
by three Angola women while grinding the crops. The perspective of love, how it
means to people of various ages are questioned in the middle portion of the
film. The way people consider about relationships, happenings of marriage in
various cultures are showcased. After all these family, trust, hope, love, relationship,
marriage sequences comes the fear, war and the death part in climax just like life.
There were lots of monologue shots. The two best monologues
that I liked and felt like giving a salute and standing ovation were by the
African guy in a boat (Near the opening scene ) and the girl inside the car (In
climax). It was so true from heart and realistic.
The movie ends with a bunch of people doing fireworks and lantern for some
ceremony and flew those in the night’s sky, lighting a positive
glorious flame inside us.
I couldn’t be specific about my favourite character. Right
from the lady overcoming cancer, bicyclist for peace Okhwan yoon, a boy who
shines the shoes, a little girl reaching the heights of her aspiration, a man
working overseas just for the sake of his family, a women waiting for her
husband’s return, a guy trying to propose his girl friend and another guy
trying to express his grandma about his love on his boyfriend, budding parkour
friends, One can easily relate to any of these characters and wind up speechless
with at least a drop of tear and a little smile, mutually. The movie explored
the whole life after all.
In the end credits there was a shot in which a snail sliming in a
round surface, surrealistically turns out to be the surface of earth.
I feel like it’s a sarcastic portrayal of a human soul sliming in the surface
of earth exploring the quest and mystery of life. The shot later turns out to be the inside-of a camera lens (as if the
camera is buried on ground) where a cow tries to lick it and eat it up and walks
past as if it leaves the space for an open sky. Millions of thoughts and hopes pondered up
after the screen went down. And I started to write :)
P.S. As mentioned by @venkyyells in twitter, I wish I could
have contributed a video for this stupendous classic.
