Though it is never explicitly invoked , '' You Are Here '' is primarily about the Internet and the information society . At a festival question-and-answer session in Utrecht , Cockburn said the film comes from anxieties and feelings " that are very specifc to the current digital age " . In an interview with Adam Nayman , who notes that Cockburn 's previous short pieces carry a recurrent theme of technophobia , Cockburn said he wanted to make a movie that expressed anxiety about a world where mapping and archiving the world is more substantial than the world itself : " Photography or video is already one step removed from reality . The second step away from reality is : how is it stored , how is it findable ? There 's the world , there 's pictures of the world , and there 's this multitude of search engines that you can use . " In a similar vein , Cockburn , said the film is all about " location , or at least talking around the idea of location ... the non-specificity of place ... closely connected to the anxiety and uncertainty-of - selfhood that I hope is somewhere near the movie 's heart . " In an interview with John Semley , Cockburn acknowledges Jorge Luis Borges as an influence on '' You Are Here '' , in particular , " where he talks about imagining the path that someone travels in their life and how if you could see that path it might somehow form a shape " , that is , a trace " that no person will ever be able to know or see or understand . " That idea is structurally the heart of the movie , but it 's also key to the emotional resonance . All the characters are struggling to come to terms with the fact that they ca n't know the bigger picture of the universe they ’re living in . They ca n't know how they relate to the other pieces . They ca n’t see the traces they are leaving . Cockburn has related how , at the 35th annual Toronto International Film Festival , in response to someone asking the actors what they thought the movie was about , most of the actors having just seen it for the first time , R.D. Reid said : " I think this film is about the attempt to deal with a deep-rooted despair " , which surprised Cockburn , since they had not talked about it : " I was really gratified to hear him say that . I thought that is a very appropriate interpretation of the movie . " In the same exchange , Cockburn also noted : " A couple of people have written about it being hopeful , which I 'll accept . " In his interview with Cockburn , Adam Nayman argued that the film was hopeful " insofar as it urges the viewer to simply take stock of his and her reality and act accordingly , " to which Cockburn replied : " It 's gratifying to hear it positioned that way . " In a number of interviews , Cockburn has said that '' You Are Here '' is ultimately related to a period when he went through a paranoid-delusional breakdown : " everything I saw , read , and heard was some sort of message to me that needed to be decoded . " It was a period of " intense meaning-making ... I 'd be looking at any text I 'd encounter like a menu or road sign and I 'd scramble the letters around and see if there were any different codes there that needed to be deciphered . " After a long time , he realized that this behaviour , which was emotionally exhausting and troubling , had emotional underpinnings : " It became something that was n't just an enjoyable intellectual play . ... In a number of ways I worked through it , and part of that was figuring out what the emotional reasons were . " That experience " stayed " with him and worked its way into " just about everything " he wrote or directed : '' You Are Here '' is a compendium of characters dealing with the question of whether their life is just a series of random events , or whether there ’s some " Great Code " at the heart of it all . It 's a cerebral concept , but when you 're in the middle of it , it 's scary and exciting and sometimes even funny , and that , for me , is the heart of the movie . Cockburn 's literary influences for '' You Are Here '' include Paul Auster and especially Jorge Luis Borges . His film influences include the directors Todd Haynes ( '' Poison '' and '' I 'm Not There '' in particular ) , " for how he plays with film language with multiple styles in one movie , or the same character being played by multiple actors " , and Charlie Kaufman ( '' Synecdoche , New York '' ) , which " came out just as we were beginning to cut '' You Are Here '' " . The film was a Rosetta Stone of sorts , " in its willingness to seriously mess around with the supposed rules of filmmaking and storytelling , but ultimately being a comprehensible and moving experience that hits you on levels you did n’t even know you had . " It gave Cockburn a lot of hope for his own film
35th annual Toronto International Film Festival
2010 Toronto International Film Festival
You Are Here (2010 film)