You Are Here (2010)

Directed by

Daniel Cockburn

Genre

drama film

Country

Canada

Runtime

1h 19m

Rating

5.8 of 10 from 10 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A woman finds a series of audiovisual documents from other universes left for her to discover. She collects them in a space she calls the Archive and tries to understand their meaning. The film interweaves vignettes about a lecturer and an experimenter.

philosophicalexperimentalquirkycerebralfragmentedcontemplativemysteriousinventive

What happens

You Are Here is a 2010 Canadian philosophical speculative fiction film written and directed by video artist Daniel Cockburn, which he also co-produced with Daniel Bekerman. Cockburn's first feature film is "hyper-inventive and categorically hard-to-describe", initially billed as a "Borgesian fantasy" or a "meta-detective story", and later as "part experimental gallery film and part philosophical sketch comedy." In You Are Here, Cockburn makes use of the techniques and concepts he had honed over the previous decade as an experimental video artist with "a narrative bent", and "works them into a complex and unique cinematic structure." The film mainly follows a woman (Tracy Wright, who died of cancer seven weeks before the film was released) searching for the meaning behind a series of audiovisual documents from other universes, seemingly left purposefully for her to find, some of which are shown as vignettes concerning figures such as the Lecturer (R.D. Reid) and the Experimenter (Anand Rajaram) interspersed throughout the film. She finds so many of them that they fill a space which she calls the Archive, and herself its Archivist. In time, the Archive appears to resist her attempts at cataloguing and organizing it, and she receives a cell phone instead of the usual document, leading to a fateful encounter with others. The film features music composed by Rick Hyslop and visual effects by Robert James Spurway, and makes use of excerpts from films by fellow Canadian filmmaker John Price. It has been presented at over forty film festivals worldwide, and compared to the works of Charlie Kaufman, Jorge Luis Borges, and Philip K. Dick. The film is a recipient of both the Jay Scott Prize in 2010, and the EMAF Award in 2011, and with few exceptions, has been received enthusiastically by critics. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

Trailer

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