At the beginning of 2013, the American writer and journalist Gene Weingarten, double recipient of the prestigious Pulitzer Prize, asked three strangers to draw lots for a day, a month and a year. Chance chose Sunday December 28, 1986. A priori day “ banal “, which Weingarten strives to recount in detail for six years through a book dedicated to ” everything that happened that day in the United States » (One Day: The Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary 24 Hours in AmericaBlue Rider Press editions). Obviously unattainable, especially given the geographical vastness of Uncle Sam’s country, the objective serves above all as a pretext for its author to demonstrate the irremediably ” extraordinaire » of every microgram of human life, no matter how anecdotal it seems on the surface.
Evasive remarks
It’s armed with the same kind of totalizing ambition that arrives in theaters this Wednesday Dreamlanda documentary as modest in its form as it is disproportionate in its empirical scope. Dedicated to “ dreams of youth » from all over the world, this aims to embrace not a day but a “ generation », without this being clearly defined in terms of age. For an hour and twenty minutes, the four directors at work (Théophile Moreau, Julie Marchal, Agathe Roussel, Paul Gourdon) parade dozens of confessions of young adults around this same motif, from Kenyan villages to Berlin parks in passing through the plains of Kyrgyzstan. The close still shots follow one another according to the words of each person, interspersed with a few rare landscapes as transitions.
