You are here

• You Are Here / You Are Here
  Daniel Cockburn’s feature might be identified as a meta-detective story. A man trapped in a room answers questions in Chinese without comprehending the language. Confused pedestrians wander the city streets, taking meaningless orders from a control centre that guides their movements. A child tells the story of a mad scientist whose ubiquitous computer-eye threatens to take over the world. These are just a few of the confounding twists in you are here, the first feature directed by Toronto-based video artist Daniel Cockburn. With that broadly conceived mindgame, he launches a seriously heavy look at the elusive nature of identity. Shifting to a new setting every few minutes, he makes it difficult to contemplate any given strand for too long, extending the laser pointer challenge to an endlessly boggling structure. Unless, as another character explicitly informs us in the opening scene, that’s precisely not what we’re supposed to do. You Are Here is a Borgesian fantasy composed of multiple worlds, circling and weaving around each other in always- unexpected ways.At the centre of this narrative labyrinth is a reclusive woman (Tracy Wright) who searches for meaning in the mysterious documents that keep appearing to her. Her investigation begins when she finds a tape recording of a man giving a bizarre lecture: calming and sinister at the same time, he instructs how to ›get where you need to go‹. Is this a random find, or a message to her? Another strange document presents itself, and another… Swiftly her home becomes an archive brimming with enigmatic texts, images and sounds. She forms deep connections with the people contained in these documents - the Lecturer, a Prisoner, an Inventor - each of them, like her, struggling with the unknowable laws of their own worlds. But the organized becomes the organizer when her meticulous system turns on her; the archive is a trickster threatening to pull her mind apart. As realities collapse and intersect around her, she must make a final choice: is she a free agent, or just a tool of the archive?‹ Innovative in form and unique in its content,YOU ARE HERE is an intellectually adventurous movie that explores the nature of consciousness, the relationship between technology and our sense of self, and what happens to a mind when it spends too long inside an experiment of its own devising. ›Inventive and multi -layered , You Are Here is a brilliantly organized first feature full of philosophical ideas and tremendous energy.‹ – Atom Egoyan
  Director/author: Daniel Cockburn 
  Canada   2010
  Film & Video Video 78 min.