You Are Here

Daniel Cockburn’s debut feature film, You Are Here is a bizarre and mindstraining experimental film (despite what the director claimed in the Q&A session) that follows a woman investigating several documents and seemingly random objects that continue to reappear as she keeps filing and archiving them away.

The film opens with what looks like handy-cam footage of a real-life motivational speaker, but soon falls into a bizarre narrated world where actors keep changing (via fantastic stop-motion effects that really fit in with the feel of the film), the story constants shifts gear, with many questions asked but never really get resolved. This movie can be best described as “video art” – it has really unique visual style, lots of great production design, a clever soundscape and some really great moments (one particular scene on the beach was very amusing), however the film as a whole felt like a whole heap of vague concepts thrown together just to see what happens.

Although there were some continuous themes and visual motifs throughout the whole film, and there was a rough beginning, middle and end with some clever set-ups and pay-offs, overall, personally I felt like this film was purely made so that the director wanted to experiment with his art – not entertain or challenge an audience. From that perspective, I was able to take away a few really interesting story and visual ideas that I can possibly incorporate into my own work – but this definitely isn’t a film I would recommended to the general public.