Video mosaic of a day on Earth

Life in a Day is like a man (woman and child)-on-the-street interview gone insanely and inventively viral. Carved out of cyber-reality and global in reach, this fast-paced documentary is shaped as much by Internet savvy as traditional filmmaking, which doesn't make the experience of it any less satisfying, or the implications any less provocative.

As with all things Web-driven, it's a numbers game, and Life in a Day is no exception. The documentary was fashioned by director Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland) and editor Joe Walker (Hunger) out of contributions from roughly 80,000 directors-for-a-day who took up the call via YouTube for a home-cooked slice of their life. Ultimately the vision of nearly 500 of them made the director's cut and the credit list. The more than 4,500 hours of video submitted were culled down over many months to a 90-minute flashcard-style story that tries to capture the rhythms and unravel the rhymes of a single 24-hour period.

The day chosen was July 24, 2010. You'll likely want to go back to last year's calendar at some point to see if you can dredge up any memories of how you spent it and if it was anywhere near as exhilarating and surprising as Macdonald's film suggests. The fact that we all experienced that day is part of what gives the documentary an unusual kind of relatability.

As the videos cut from city to country, from high tech to Third World, what emerges is a human population mystified, captivated, and sometimes horrified by what can happen in a given day. The story is told through the voices of the contributors, but mostly it's the images that do the heavy lifting - the tranquillity of a moment as giant soap bubbles blow and bounce across a pristine lake, the crush of humanity that kills in a protest turned riot, a lone man's desolation in the night, a new mother's hope in a new day. Stitching it all together are the fundamentals - teeth brushed, breakfast cooked, loved ones kissed, and feet, so many different feet, rushing rushing rushing all over the world. We are all in a hurry to get somewhere, it seems.

The film may be the most hopeful yet from Macdonald, a director who has made his reputation by digging into the more corrupted and conflicted side of human nature with One Day in September, his Oscar-winning documentary on the 1972 Munich massacre of Israeli Olympic athletes still among his best. Still, the lightness he has unearthed in Life in a Day has an earthy and at times euphoric appeal.

Helping on that front is the editing artistry of Walker (and an expansive team); the man in charge of all that splicing and dicing keeps things moving at an entertaining clip.EndText