You Are Here (2010 film)

You Are Here
Directed by	Daniel Cockburn
Written by	Daniel Cockburn
Starring	Tracy Wright R.D. Reid Anand Rajaram Nadia Litz
Cinematography	Cabot McNenly
Edited by	Duff Smith
Music by	Rick Hyslop
Release dates	August 10, 2010 (2010-08-10) (Locarno) September 15, 2010 (2010-09-15) (TIFF) May 11, 2012 (2012-05-11) (U.S.)
Running time	79 minutes
Country	Canada
Language	English

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. Alternately billed as a "Borgesian fantasy" and a "meta-detective story", Cockburn's first feature film mainly following a woman (Tracy Wright, in her final performance) 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 they fill a room 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.

Principle characters and cast

• The Archivist, portrayed by Tracy Wright
  
• The Lecturer, portrayed by R.D. Reid
  
• The Experimenter, portrayed by Anand Rajaram
  
• The Assistant, portrayed by Nadia Capone
  
• Voice of the Philosopher, voiced by Hardee Lineham
  
• The Trackers (Verna, Hal, Sharon, Bob) portrayed by Shannon Beckner, Richard Clarkin, Jenni Burk, Robert Kennedy
  
• The Field Agents (Marcie, Edgar) portrayed by Nadia Litz, Alec Stockwell
  
• Narrating Alan, portrayed by Scott Anderson
  
• Alan in the stairwell, portrayed by Emily Davidson-Niedoba
  
• The Children, portrayed by Shae Norris, Rosie Elia, Isaac Durmford
  
• The Inventor, portrayed by Peter Solala
  
• Child's voice, voiced by London Angelis
  

Themes

Though it is never explicitly invoked, You Are Here is primarily about the Internet and the information society. In an interview with Adam Nayman, who notes that Cockburn's previous short pieces carry a recurrent theme of technophobia, Cockburn said he wanted to make a movie that expressed anxiety about a world where mapping and archiving the world is more substantial than the world itself: "Photography or video is already one step removed from reality. The second step away from reality is: how is it stored, how is it findable? There's the world, there's pictures of the world, and there's this multitude of search engines that you can use." On another level, Cockburn said the film is all about "location, or at least talking around the idea of location ... the non-specificity of place ... closely connected to the anxiety and uncertainty-of-selfhood that I hope is somewhere near the movie's heart."

Production

Writing

The process of writing You Are Here from conception to final draft took two and a half years. In an interview with Norman Wilner, Cockburn said he first conceived of You Are Here as "both a series of shorts and a feature-length movie," like a concept album or short story collection that "halfway through, you realize is actually a novel." In the Nayman interview, Cockburn complained that in previous screenings of his short films, reception depended a lot on what other films they were shown with, and he started to think it might be a good idea to make a series of short films that were "a whole program unto themselves, which were intended to be shown together, with certain recurring images and ideas." Initially, there were six short film scripts, each section with its own title, separated by red pages: "Someone read them and said that the red pages made sense with regards to the script as a physical object—as a way of organizing the pages—but told me to ask myself what they stood for in the film. This same person also told me that I needed to give the audience a way into the material, a kind of proxy character. From those two suggestions, I came up with the idea of the Archivist and her dilemma."

The end credits ambiguously suggest the film may or may not include an accurate representation of American philosopher John Searle's ideas. The scenes with the Experimenter are based on Searle's Chinese room thought experiment, which Cockburn described in 2016 as "sort of a pessimistic cousin" to the Turing test: Cockburn, who believes in acknowledging his sources, called Searle on the telephone seeking permission to use the Chinese room, and says Searle replied he was "very busy" without elaboration (a footnote states he later gave "succinct approval"). In the Nayman interview, Cockburn simply recounts getting permission from Searle, and then remarks that he forgot to credit Douglas Hofstadter who wrote Gödel, Escher, Bach, which was the source for the film's "headache" word puzzle.

Casting

Cockburn thought Tracy Wright would be perfect for the role of the Archivist after seeing her in Monkey Warfare. He contacted her through Jacob Wren, sent her the script, then met and talked with her for three hours, during which she said she didn’t "get" the script: "I ended up telling her about a paranoid-delusional breakdown I'd gone through, and how that was the emotional basis for what I'd written. I don't know if that's what helped her find her way in, but however it happened, she found the non-theoretical, genuine core of the character." Wright shot You Are Here about a year before her diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, and saw the finished work a few months before her death.

Filming

You Are Here was shot on almost all possible formats: 35mm, 16mm, RED, HD, MiniDV, Super 8, and BetaMax, in what Nayman calls a "lo-fi, anachronistic production design". Though the film was shot entirely in Toronto, Cockburn deliberately fudged the city's geography, making up "a mishmash of Toronto streets and also made-up names and numbered streets so nobody could ever watch the movie and try to correlate it with extant geography." The books for the Chinese room were styrofoam props made by the film's production designer. After finishing the film, Cockburn says he carried these fake books with him from home to home despite their having no use: "After eight years, I finally threw them out."

Release and reception

The film premiered at the Locarno Film Festival in August 2010, and then had its North American premiere on September 15, 2010, at the 35th annual Toronto International Film Festival. It received a limited release in the United States, the American premiere taking place in New York City on May 11, 2012.

Critical response

Sources differ as to the film's reception at Locarno. Audiences at Locarno are said to have been "sharply divided" by Leslie Felperin, whereas Norman Wilner says it was "received enthusiastically by critics and audiences." Early festival reviews, such as Felperin's, called the film "charming" and "playful" and compared it to the films of Charlie Kaufman. On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film has achieved a score of 82% based on eleven reviews, for an average rating of 7/10. On Metacritic, which uses a weighted score, the film has received a 63 out of 100 based on four reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews".

Leslie Felperin praised the "mostly unknown cast", who contributed "solid" performances: "Wright’s part is the meatiest by far, and she brings an affecting vulnerability to her role as the confused archivist." Contrastingly, Erick Kohn admires the ambition of the film, but says it "suffers from stilted, humorless performances and some clunky pacing issues"; even so, he says "the ideas sustain it", and "Cockburn's use of pop philosophy yields an original form of heady entertainment", assigning the film a grade of "B+". Eli Glasner gives the film 3.5/5: "To be blunt, this movie's not for everyone, but stick with it to the end and some of the puzzle pieces finally fall into place. If you're looking for explanations, Cockburn would never be so obvious. A mood piece and a post-modern maze, You Are Here is where you are."

Accolades

• Jay Scott Prize for Emerging Talent (Toronto Film Critics Association Awards 2010)
  
• EMAF Award (24th European Media Art Festival, 2011)

Home media and streaming

A DVD has been available from IndiePix Films in the U.S since June 2012, with video on demand and download options.

Streaming service Mubi showed You Are Here "nearly worldwide" from September 29 to October 28, 2016. <ref name="MUBI">

External links

• Official web site
• Official trailer on Vimeo
• Official trailer on YouTube
• You Are Here on IMDb