Italy in a Day - Un giorno da italiani

An Italian documentary made out of a single day. The method is this: a date is announced and everyone in the country films themselves on it. A great deal of footage comes in. Thousands of files, from every region and every age. The team sift them and lay them out as one day. The film opens with morning. Waking, breakfasts, journeys to work. Then the day moves on. Workplaces, schools, hospitals, fields, balconies. Something else happens in the evening. People tell the camera more. From there the film becomes a series of confessions. Someone who has lost a job, someone ill, someone living alone, someone thinking of leaving the country. The crisis is everywhere. The narrative does not open it as a heading; people bring it up themselves and keep bringing it up. What the narrative is interested in is not a day but a country: its idea is that an ordinary date gives up the state of Italy at that moment on its own. The editing is the real work. The images are ordinary on their own; the meaning comes from the ordering, and this is a film made entirely at the cutting table. The method belongs to an international series. The same model had been used earlier on a global production and the Italian version was prepared with Ridley Scott's production company. Some sections are too neat. The narrative builds an emotional curve and at times steers its material more than it needs to. The sound runs as a band. The voices overlap and nobody is introduced individually. Gabriele Salvatores directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes documentaries built from user footage and portraits of a country. Who it is not for: anyone looking for narrative; the film tells no story and the faces flow past.