Life in a Day (12A)

Kevin Macdonald has sifted 4,500 hours of YouTube footage submitted from around the globe to make the record of a single day: 24 July, 2010.

The patchwork meditation that emerges is jumpy, chaotic, banal, moving, wry, funny, frightening – the stuff of life itself. From the hundreds of clips whizzing past a handful stick to your brain like flypaper: a Korean widower remembering his late wife; a young woman quoting a dead South American dialect. The montages of people washing, or cooking, or drumming, are fun but not especially illuminating, and the we-are-the-world moments of affection are often soppy. The best comes last, a video diary by a disappointed girl who confesses that nothing much has happened to her today, expressing at once the shared fear of insignificance and her honest gratitude at being alive.