Review: Life in a Day (12A)****

This is a collective portrait of real life by the people who are living it. It’s genuine, authentic, believable and wholly compelling.

In fact, it could be the most important piece of documentary reportage yet compiled in this fast-moving 21st century.

Vignette flows into vignette with precision and ease in this quite remarkable representation of modern humanity.

It chronicles the rich to the poor with everything else in between. There are no famous faces save for a hint of Bette Davis’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. There is no sex. Some drugs. And some rock ‘n’ roll.

It touches on religion, war, violence and death. But it manages to transcend all as a picture of ordinary folk getting on with life in often trying circumstances.

Selected moments include a homosexual boy coming out to his grandmother; a father reading Walt Whitman poetry to his babies; an army wife sprucing up for a date on the internet with her soldier hubbie in a far-off combat zone; a Korean explorer cycling around the world – for nine years.

It is a video diary of a heart patient, a pregnant mum, a lazy son and a lad having his first shave.

It is astonishingly deep in its simplicity, and a must-see for anyone interested in the documentary form.

Released on June 17