Kevin Macdonald’s film aspires to be a snapshot of human life, combining user-submitted YouTube videos of minor happenings shot over the 24 hours of July 24, 2010. What it achieves is little more than a few nice moments slapped together on a ramshackle canvas. Though the randomness of Macdonald’s panorama is intentional, with no real narrative the film grows tiresome before it reaches the noon mark. In a culture of hyper-aware self-documentation, these moments (culled from 4,500 hours of footage) frequently seem contrived. Macdonald might have wondered how people around the world spend their Saturdays, but the question he ends up answering is how they spend their Saturdays when they’re trying to be film-worthy.
Saturday, June 25 at 10 p.m. at AFI Silver 1; also on Sunday, June 26 at 11:45 a.m. at AFI Silver 2.