This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2011, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Park City • Forget about exclusive parties and velvet ropes — for one night, the 2011 Sundance Film Festival was wide open to the world.
Thursday night's premiere of "Life in a Day," a crowd-sourced documentary culled from 80,000 submissions from 192 countries, was streamed live over YouTube.
Meanwhile, films that premiered earlier this week in Park City played in nine U.S. cities, in the second annual Sundance Film Festival USA.
After the "Life in a Day" premiere, 24 of the film's videographers and subjects — from Egypt, Indonesia, Japan, Peru, Russia, the Ukraine, Nepal, Spain, Dubai and the United States — took to the Eccles Theatre stage for a question-and-answer session, with questions both from the live audience and online viewers.
"I'm only one of 390 directors," said the movie's director of record, Kevin Macdonald, whose credits include "State of Play" and "The Last King of Scotland."
The movie focused on the everyday occurrences on a single day — July 24, 2010 — and covered a wealth of ideas and happenings. Among those spotlighted were a Peruvian boy making small change shining shoes, a Russian teen who demonstrates the building-hopping martial arts style called parkour, and an Illinois woman struggling with cancer.
"It was very healing," Catherine Anne Liginsky, of Grayslake, Ill., said of her family's involvement in the film. "I'm doing good. I'm all done with my treatments," she told the relieved Eccles audience.
"I was working as a location manager, and I always wanted to make movies, and now my dream came true," Boris Grishkevich, who shot footage of Ukrainian goat herders, said through an interpreter.
Macdonald said his crew strived to focus on daily life — from breakfast in the morning through work and play — rather than on big events.
They were helped by the fact, Macdonald said, that "it was an uncanny, not-newsworthy day." The one exception, which is covered in the film, was a stampede at the LoveParade rock festival in Germany that killed 24 people.
Otherwise, the events in the film are positive, said producer Liza Marshall, because mostly people sent footage of people being happy and upbeat.
"We wanted to go darker at the end of the film, and it was a real struggle to find enough material," Marshall said. (Festival director John Cooper then joked, "That's the opposite of programming Sundance.")
There were common themes in the footage, said editor Joe Walker. There were many submissions of "teenagers whining in their bedroom," Walker said. "And we had so many people following their own feet. We could make a 10-hour film of people just walking."
"The danger with this film is always that it would feel like a Coca-Cola commercial," Macdonald said. "The message is about connection. We're all connected. That's one of the things that the Internet has succeeded in doing: It's made us all feel very connected, and more conscious of the globe as a whole. That can only be a good thing."
'Life in a Day' screenings
8:30 a.m. Friday • Library Center Theatre, Park City
9:30 p.m. Saturday • Peery's Egyptian Theater, Ogden
The movie's producers are in negotiations with National Geographic Films to release the movie nationally.