Life in a Day 2020

Ten years after the well-received doc­u­men­tary Life in a Day was released, direc­tor Kevin Mac­don­ald is back with a sequel, apt­ly titled Life in a Day 2020. The con­cept is the same: a sin­gle day on Earth cap­tured by thou­sands of par­tic­i­pants across hun­dreds of coun­tries edit­ed down to a sin­gle 90-minute film.

The day in ques­tion is 25 July, 2020, a year not quite like any oth­er. The pan­dem­ic is evi­dent from the first minute, with a com­pi­la­tion of babies being born to dif­fer­ent women. Some lie serene in bright­ly lit hos­pi­tal suites and oth­er grunt on all fours whilst crown­ing in their liv­ing room. This is all set, fit­ting­ly, to the oper­at­ic singing of a doc­tor film­ing him­self while in full PPE.

Beyond that the rest of the day most­ly takes part chrono­log­i­cal­ly from sun­rise to sun­set with a few clus­ters of themes like ​‘love’, ​‘food’, ​‘YouTu­bers’ and ​‘the fight to end white suprema­cy’. A lot of the con­tent that makes it up is sac­cha­rine but charm­ing self-filmed footage: a baby crawl­ing for the first time; a pas­sion­ate train spot­ter; a man melt­ing blocks of ice for drink­ing water while reflect­ing, ​“What I fear most is my life will passed unnoticed.”

For all that they tug on the heart strings there is a lay­er of arti­fice to every clip and an air of per­for­mance. These moments are being self-filmed but they are also self-curat­ed and there­fore have all the authen­tic­i­ty of an Insta­gram feed. This buffs the film clean of the grit­ty real­i­ty of life mid­way through one of the most fas­ci­nat­ing and unprece­dent­ed years in mod­ern history.

The cho­sen date itself is an inter­est­ing one. Look­ing back to late last July, the pan­dem­ic seemed to be wan­ing, and one can imag­ine there was an assump­tion from the par­tic­i­pants and the film­mak­ers that by the time this film came out we’d be reflect­ing in rel­a­tive safe­ty rather than engulfed in a dev­as­tat­ing sec­ond wave. As a result, much of the gath­er­ings and cel­e­bra­tions have a very dif­fer­ent tone, evok­ing less heart-warm­ing glee and more infu­ri­a­tion as exam­ples of the rea­sons the sec­ond wave happened.

To be fair to Life in a Day 2020, this film is not about coro­n­avirus, it is more root­ed in a vague inane all-you-need-is-love phi­los­o­phy about ​‘one­ness’. As inof­fen­sive as that is a con­cept it seems ludi­crous­ly light­weight when depict­ing a sin­gle day of the night­mare of 2020. This film is not as inter­est­ed in strug­gle as it is in cre­at­ing stun­ning mon­tages using self-film­ing drones over glob­al beau­ty spots.

In many ways it suc­ceeds most when it lets go of attempt­ing to be a doc­u­men­tary with some­thing to say and just full on embraces being beau­ti­ful­ly con­struct­ed screen­saver with a light smat­ter­ing of YouTube prod­uct placement.