Sundance review: 'Life in a Day 2020' shows us the world during the pandemic, and so much more

‘Life in a Day 2020’

★★★

Appearing in the Special Screenings section of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. Can be streamed through the festival digital portal on Wednesday, February 3. Running time: 87 minutes.

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I know, I know, the last thing any of us want to do is relive a single day of 2020 — but it’s worth making an exception to watch “Life in a Day 2020,” a fascinating lap around the Earth that captures so much of what makes humans wonderful.

The premise is both simple and daunting. The project, sponsored by YouTube, asks people from all over to submit video of what they were doing on one day — July 25, 2020. Some 392,000 people in 192 countries did, and director Kevin Macdonald (“The Last King of Scotland”) and his team dug through them to find 90 minutes of material to tell a universal story.

Macdonald did this same trick with YouTube 10 years ago, for the first “Life in a Day” project, which also premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Macdonald said he might want to take it up again in 2030, in a series in the tradition of Michael Apted’s “Up” documentaries.

So what happens in a day? Some babies are born, some people are given funerals, some people graduate from school and get married. Some go out into nature, while others stay indoors. Actually, more of them stay indoors, because we’re all in the middle of a global pandemic.

COVID-19 is a major player in “Life in a Day 2020,” because there’s no way it couldn’t be. We see sanitation workers in China wiping down every surface in sight. We see a montage of Zoom calls. We hear from a mom whose son, featured in the first “Life in a Day” 10 years ago, died from COVID-19 earlier last year.

There’s a moment where a little boy from somewhere in America complains that “COVID ruined everything” because he had to cancel a trip to Six Flags and a sleepover with his friend Cole. We can all feel for this kid, because that’s us in 2020.

But there’s another moment when a Kansas City woman comes back to the car from a doctor’s appointment. She tells her husband that the test came back negative, and she starts crying. It’s then that we realize it wasn’t a COVID test, but a pregnancy test — and that this couple has been trying very hard to have a baby. It’s a poignant example of the message of “Life in a Day 2020,” that for all our hardships, life goes on.