Life in a Day (2011 film)
They asked hundreds of people all over Britain to write diaries recording the details of their lives on one day a month and answer a few simple questions.These diaries were then organised into books and articles with the intention of giving voice to people who weren't part of the "elite" and to show the intricacy and strangeness of the seemingly mundane."[16] At a reported cost of £40,000,[18] "we did resort to snail mail for sending out 400 cameras to parts of the developing world – and getting back the resulting video cards."[17] Walker, whose team edited the whole film over seven weeks, remarked to Adam Sternbergh of The New York Times that "The analogy is like being told to make Salisbury Cathedral, and then being introduced to a field full of rubble."[19] Walker indicated that a team of roughly two dozen researchers, chosen both for a cinematic eye and proficiency with languages, watched, logged, tagged, and rated each clip on a scale of one to five stars."[16] Betsy Sharkey wrote in the Los Angeles Times that "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."[22] The Washington Post's Michael O'Sullivan similarly noted that "the people whose lives form the spine of Life feel familiar... Their hopes and joys, disappointments and fears are our own."[24] Toronto Star critic Peter Howell was in accord, observing that the "film shows things (what) billions of us do every day, perhaps thinking that we are somehow alone in our pursuits."[25] However, The Boston Globe's Tom Russo gave director "Macdonald and crew credit for picking out good, clear, telling contrasts, and not sweating potential heavy-handedness," citing contrasts between "one smug contributor pull[ing] a set of Lamborghini keys from his pocket, ... then mov[ing] on to ragged-looking Third Worlders amusedly scoffing at the idea that they'd have anything in their pockets," and a Westerner "quietly worries about losing his hair, while an older Afghan man quietly worries about getting through the day alive."[27] O'Sullivan said that, being "alternately funny, scary, boring, moving, amateurish and gorgeous, it is a pretty spectacular thing: a crowdsourced movie that manages to feel singular and whole."[19] The Los Angeles Times' Betsy Sharkey wrote that "The fact that we all experienced that day is part of what gives the documentary an unusual kind of relatability."[22] Liz Braun, writing in the Toronto Sun, said that "a lot is predictable" and "It's all familiar for the most part, and it's all mildly interesting," but also cited several "sequences that fully engage a viewer emotionally."[34] Contentions such as Schenker's were contradicted by The New York Times' Adam Sternbergh who wrote that "if the knock against the Internet... is that it stokes our collective narcissism, this film, in its best moments, proves the opposite: not a global craving for exposure but a surprising universal willingness to allow ourselves to be exposed.Musetto, a critic from the New York Post, said about the film: "Judging by the National Geographic doc Life in a Day, a lot of nothing happened on 24 July 2010."[35] A counterpoint was expressed by the Los Angeles Times' Betsy Sharkey: "the world community had a lot of interesting things on its mind, but it still took filmmakers like Macdonald and Walker to help us say it with feeling.[42] Italy in a Day (September 2014), directed by Gabriele Salvatores, included clips selected from 45,000 crowd-sourced video submissions recorded on 26 October 2013, and premiered during the 71st Venice International Film Festival.