You Are Here is a 2010 Canadian film directed by video artist Daniel Cockburn, which he co-produced with Daniel Bekerman. Alternately billed as a "Borgesian fantasy" and a "meta-detective story", Cockburn's debut feature film mainly follows a woman (played by Tracy Wright) searching for the meaning behind a series of documents seemingly left purposefully for her to find, some of which are shown as vignettes interspersed throughout the film. She finds so many of them they fill a room she calls the Archive, and herself its "Archivist". The film features music by Rick Hyslop and visual effects by James Spurway. The film makes use of excerpts from films by fellow Canadian filmmaker John Price.
In addition to the above, "Alan," a cipher character portrayed by several actors of distinct ethnicities and genders.
In an interview with Adam Nayman, Cockburn described the process of writing You Are Here from conception to final draft as taking two and a half years, producing a series of short films intended to be shown together. It was shot entirely in Toronto, using several different formats: "Cockburn, whose previous short pieces carry a recurrent theme of technophobia, opts for a lo-fi, anachronistic production design, and shoots on almost all possible formats: 35mm, 16mm, RED, HD, MiniDV, Super 8, and even BetaMax." 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." [1]
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 called Searle on the telephone seeking permission to use the Chinese room, and says Searle replied he was "very busy" without elaboration.[2] In the Nayman interview, Cockburn simply recounts getting permission from Searle.
Early festival reviews called the film "charming" and "playful" and compared it to the films of Charlie Kaufman.[3] On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film has achieved a score of 82% based on eleven reviews, for an average rating of 7/10.[4] On Metacritic, which uses a weighted score, the film has received a 63 out of 100 based on four reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[5]
Writing for IndieWire, Erick Kohn admires the ambition of the film, which he says "suffers from stilted, humorless performances and some clunky pacing issues" but that "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+".[6]