Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
I think that the thing that's been most striking to me,
watching all the clips that come in, is how similar we
all are around the world.
You're looking at raw personal footage that people are letting
you in on that you wouldn't normally get in a documentary.
These clips are about birth, and they're about love,
children, illness, death.
That's kind of-- most of the clips kind of fall
into that category.
After a day when one had seen something like 200 clips, five
or six hours of material, you'd feel slightly like a therapist
might feel at the end of the day when people have been sort
of disgorging endless strong feelings and personal
information, and you're left exhausted.
To hear ordinary people express those very basic emotions and
ideas is really powerful and very direct.
And I think that's what's so beautiful about the film
overall is that it has this honesty about it, this
directness about it.
The thing that moves steadily through the film is the sense
of time, and that felt like the obvious kind of thing to go
for, I suppose, but it also works, and you have a sense of
the day breaking and people getting up all together.
You'll go from a teenager in his bedroom in New York telling
you what he loves the most in the world to this amazing Masai
woman with her necklaces, standing outside her hut,
telling you what she loves the most, and just that
clash is so wonderful.
There's these ways of sort of building a sequence as if
one thing is happening, but through many different clips.
A guy in India takes a newspaper out of his
newspaper basket.
A paperboy walks up the steps in Canada.
He drops it through a letter box in Italy, and a guy in
Spain picks it up, and a person in Peru opens it and reads it.
You could follow it as if it was one story, but it's
actually made up of Frankenstein parts.
It's a film which is trying to explore in a serious way what
it's like to be alive today, what it was like to be alive on
the 24th of July with all the kind of pain and violence and
horror, but also love and happiness and hope and
expectation that was present on that day that is
present in every day.