Daniel Cockburn’s experimental videos were once collected into a program titled You Are In A Maze Of Twisty Little Passages, All Different. That could easily have been the title of his feature debut, You Are Here, which makes its Canadian premiere at the Toronto Film Festival on Wednesday (September 15).
Like much of Cockburn’s short work, You Are Here is a structurally challenging and intellectually compelling exploration of identity and self-awareness in the context of urban alienation. It’s also a moving study of one person’s psychological crisis – doubly so since that character is played by the late Tracy Wright in one of her final screen performances.
Just returned from his movie’s world premiere at August’s Locarno Film Festival, Cockburn dropped by my place for what turned out to be the first of two long and thoughtful conversations about his movie, his vision and his goals.
“I originally conceived it as something that was both a series of shorts and a feature-length movie,” he says, “like a concept album or a collection of short stories that then, halfway through, you realize is actually a novel. Or a really well-curated short-film series. Images showed me how a really well-curated festival just sort of ampli fies the goodness of every film in the program. But it also makes them all speak to each other, so you feel like you’ve just seen a cohesive 75-minute experience.”
Cockburn soon found himself considering the project’s potential on a sort of macro-micro scale.
“What does it mean to have a thing that is composed of a bunch of little things?” he asks. “And these little things don’t necessarily understand each other or the whole that they’re part of, and they don’t even necessarily know they’re part of something bigger. When you think about it, that’s almost a fundamental principle of the universe: everything you look at, whether it’s a city, a person, a solar system or an organ, is a thing that you can look at as a thing or as a combination of littler things. And that applies to personal relationships as well: everything is parts and wholes. The length of the paragraph I just spoke sort of bespeaks the extent to which I enjoy compulsively thinking about this kind of thing,” he laughs.
After a good experience in Locarno, where You Are Here was received enthusiastically by critics and audiences, Cockburn is looking forward to watch ing his movie with a hometown crowd.
“I’m really excited to engage in dialogue with audiences about the things I make, especially this movie,” he says, bringing up a Locarno Q&A session for context.
“One guy put up his hand and was like, ‘Have you done any studying of child development psychology? Because I see that all through this movie.’ And I was like, ‘No, I haven’t, but that makes a lot of sense to me and I never would have thought of it.’ It was very pleasing to hear that people were engaging with it in ways and on levels other than the ones that were my intended and expected ones.”
Cockburn acknowledges that the Toronto screenings will necessarily be coloured by the death of co-star Tracy Wright, who succumbed to pancreatic cancer in June. (Wright shot You Are Here about a year before her diagnosis, and saw the finished work a few months before her death.)
“It’s very bittersweet to be present ing this movie now, and especially presenting it in Toronto,” he says. “It feels almost gauche to say, ‘Oh, well, she’s not here, but at least we have her performances,’ but it’s true. Pieces of peo ple are present in their performances, and because she was such an honest person and an honest performer, her performances really are pieces of herself. I would never say they could stand in for the person, but they are reminders of how genuine she could be in life and in performance.”
See a review of You Are Here.
Interview Clips
Cockburn on missing Tracy Wright:
Cockburn on possible ways to release an unconventional movie:
normw@nowtoronto.com
