I must say that I am still a bit gobsmacked. Last Saturday YLE Teema, along with a few other channels around Europe, broadcasted the monumental documentary 24h Berlin. The doc, if you can really call it that, was shot on the 5th of September 2008 and broadcast exactly one year later. The film makers followed dozens of people in their daily activities all around Berlin, and the film was edited so that what happened at 6:30 AM would be broadcast at 6:30 AM.
There were something like 80 film crews working frantically all over Berlin and I can only imagine what went through the editing teams mind when they first started to review the hours and hours of material. You can read more about the details of the project at www.24hberlin.tv
To return to the gobsmacking, what I’m really surprised about is how big an impact the whole thing made on me. If you think about it, the premise sounds interesting but boring. I mean to follow ordinary people around, while they’re driving their cars or drinking a beer or lying in a hospital bed. But when I switched the programme on, it was so enthralling that I just had to keep watching. The film makers were very professional, they found angles and themes to keep the viewer interested and it was solid documentary making at least for the 5 or so hours that I watched it.
And the best thing I think was the idea to broadcast the show all in one go. This way you could tune in to what was happening when you had time, and there would always be something interesting going on. And the viewer would also be rewarded for tuning in later. An example for this was the show at the Opera, which started at 8 PM and was referred to every now and then. When I shut down the tv at some point, went over to a friends place and we turned the tv on at around 10:30, the doc returned to the Opera to show that the show had ended. It was things like these that clearly brought across the main point of the whole programme: Berlin never sleeps and there’s always something going on somewhere.
The effect of the documentary has stayed with me for the last few days, and it has kept me thinking and looking at the world around me in a different light. On Saturday night I heard parties through open windows, and imagined that documentary teams could be there too, filming everything. I saw my street on Sunday morning and looked at the people walking around, thinking what their stories were, what they would tell the camera when asked about their day, their lives, their dreams. And this is one of the biggest reasons I think 24h Berlin is the best thing ever made for tv: It made the ordinary extraordinary.
If you caught the show, please share your thoughts in the comments!
(Here’s Deutsche Welle’s piece on the project, in english: )
I did’t actually see any of the program, but I love the idea. It’s very inspiring, makes you think the story/drama of your own ordinary life or “memorysnapshots” of your family’s history combined with others.
Yes, exactly! I also hope that either YLE will rerun the programme or that it’ll be made available through dvd or suchlike… there are many people who missed it and I personally would love to arrange a marathon to watch the whole thing in one go – with preparations this time 🙂
This document is truly editors´ nightmare – i can only imagine what it’s been like… I saw only about an hour of it, but it was extremely captivating. What an idea, and what an achievement!