TIFF 2016: Crowdsourced India in a Day doc 'a film about humanity,' says Canadian director Richie Mehta

When Richie Mehta first decided to direct the documentary India in a Day,the Toronto-born filmmaker had no idea what story the project would tell.

That's because the film relies entirely on crowdsourced footage, shot by everyday Indians on devices that ranged from old cellphones to sophisticated cameras.

The tale that is told in the final edit, however, is one that Mehta feels any audience can connect with.

"I really believe this is a film about humanity," he said in an interview before the documentary opened at the Toronto International Film Festival on Friday.

"I hope people will watch this and say, 'Yes, on the surface we're talking about India but the themes and the ideas we're talking about, they're not Indian themes.' They're themes about how far we've come as a society overall it's nothing to do with geopolitical boundaries and where we're going and who we've left behind."

The documentary is executive produced by Ridley Scott, the director behind Gladiatorand The Martian,and is supported by Google. It will eventually be released on YouTube.

Mehta, whose previous work includes the features Amaland Siddharth,both also based in India, assembled a team to first sort through roughly 16,000 clips shot by Indians on Oct. 10, 2015.

They carefully went through all the footage, rated the quality of the submissions, and tried to pick out larger stories that emerged about life in the bustling, colourful and complex country.

"We spent months and months watching it only then were we able to figure out what should this movie be about and what could it be about," Mehta said.

"I wasn't going to go against what the footage was saying and create something out of thin air."

Snapshots of Indian life

Through the film, viewers get to witness pieces of Indian life, in all its myriad ways, over 24 hours.

The snapshots include a rural farmer contemplating his future in a rapidly evolving country, a middle-class single mother pondering her life choices, and a man with a cellphone who turns out to be the only one in his village with access to the Internet. There are also beautiful shots of natural splendour and potentially shocking glimpses of squalor.

"You have people who are trying to address how far has that country come, where is it going.... There's aspects of it that are the most advanced and then you have places you see in the film that are 1,000 years old basically and things haven't changed," said Mehta.

Participants 'were questioning the progress humanity is making and questioning the direction we're going.... I think it's a relevant debate for us to be having anywhere in the world.'- Richie Mehta

"They were questioning the progress humanity is making and questioning the direction we're going.... I think it's a relevant debate for us to be having anywhere in the world."

Missing from the film, however, is footage from what Mehta called the "economically wealthy" class of India. Snapshots from the lives of the upper class simply weren't submitted something that came as a surprise, Mehta said.

Ultimately, the entire process of putting the film together while showing as much variety of life as possible resulted in a "creative challenge" that Mehta said he relished.

"I remember at one point watching one of the edits that we had completed, saying to myself, I'm finding this to be one of the most moving documentaries I've seen, because I didn't shoot it,"' he said.

"It's reflective of a real change in cinematic language, how viewers engage with film and television and narrative and audio visual material."

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