YOU ARE HERE written and directed by Daniel Cockburn, with Tracy Wright, R.D. Reid, Anand Rajaram and Nadia Litz. A Pacific Northwest Pictures release. 78 minutes. Opens Friday (August 19) at the TIFF Bell Lightbox. See Times.
Daniel Cockburn is having a pretty good year.
Almost exactly 12 months ago, the Toronto experimental filmmaker premiered his first feature, You Are Here, at the Locarno Film Festival. Shortly thereafter, he brought it home to TIFF and set the critical community buzzing.
I was one of those local critics bowled over by Cockburn’s intricately constructed narrative of lost characters searching for meaning in cryptic experiments and unexpected connections. (One of those characters is played by Tracy Wright, in one of her final screen performances.)
Catching up with Cockburn over lunch at the Lakeview on Dundas West – he has a fishwich, I have the club, and both of us drink more coffee than we probably should – I ask him how things have been going since that first Locarno screening.
“The first few months were this huge series of explosions in my mind,” he says. “It was like the movie had just been born, and it was finding its legs and then it started to talk, and talk with other people, and I stepped back and just watched it happen.”
It’s difficult to discuss You Are Here in anything but the vaguest terms to run through the plot would either spoil the viewer’s discovery of its function or make me sound like a madman. Let’s just say the movie has roots in the heady literature of Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges, and that it shares its inquisitive philosophical tone with a couple of other recent pictures, Terrence Malick’s The Tree Of Life and Mike Cahill’s Another Earth. These are all films that juxtapose individual human stories with wider existential inquiries, and give the audience the room to ponder the questions.
And audiences are responding. “At Fantasia [in Montreal], somebody wanted to know what my religious beliefs were,” Cockburn says. “I was like, ‘I don’t know.’ Discussion around this movie often tends toward people asking about my religious or cosmic beliefs. It feels strange that that should be something a roomful of people would want to know, because I’m not an authority on anything – except this movie.”
I ask what he’s enjoyed most about the festival circuit, now that the movie’s finally getting a Toronto release. (I’ll be conducting a Q&A with Cockburn after Friday’s (August 19) 7:30 pm screening at the TIFF Bell Lightbox.)
“I think the most satisfying thing about taking it around has been audience response,” he says. “Q&As or e-mails after the fact that show that people get it. They don’t just get it cerebrally, but they connect with it they find it entertaining, and they find it funny and moving. These are all the things we were hoping for, but they’re the things you can’t predetermine or guarantee. You can’t know, until the movie enters into that dialogue with other people.”
Interview Clips
Daniel Cockburn on being embraced by film festivals:
Cockburn on the way a film takes over a filmmaker’s life:
Cockburn on what the past year has taught him about his own art:
normw@nowtoronto.com
