A scene from "You Are Here"
Smart, anxious and weirdly funny, the first feature from Toronto video artist Daniel Cockburn connects a series of scenarios that gradually begin to loop into each other.
A lecturer (R.D. Reid) keeps on talking about the inner voice that keeps on talking. In an inexplicable make-work project, one group of people in an office order another group on the streets where to travel around the city. A man in a room (Anand Rajaram) answers questions in Chinese without any comprehension, simply by following instructions in a manual. An archivist (the late Tracy Wright) dutifully logs information about videos, tapes and other documents that refuse to stay where she put them.
Evocative of such famous brain-freezers as Douglas Hofstadter's 1979 book Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, and Jorge Luis Borges's story The Library of Babel, Cockburn raises clouds of question marks that feel as sharp as fish hooks.
You Are Here
- Written and directed by Daniel Cockburn
- Starring Tracy Wright, R.D. Reid and Anand Rajaram
- Classification: 14A
Liam Lacey