"[5] In You Are Here, Cockburn makes use of the techniques and concepts he had honed over the previous decade as an experimental video artist with "a narrative bent",[6] and "works them into a complex and unique cinematic structure.

In time, the Archive appears to resist her attempts at cataloguing and organizing it, and she receives a cell phone instead of the usual document, leading to a fateful encounter with others.

[9] It has been presented at over forty film festivals worldwide, and compared to the works of Charlie Kaufman, Jorge Luis Borges, and Philip K.

A lecturer discussing "the awareness of the self as a solitary construct" shines a red dot from a laser pointer on to a screen showing ocean waves crashing onto a shore.

"[9] The entry for the film on Vtape, Cockburn's usual distributor, quotes a blog review touching on these themes from the first sentence:Do you suffer under the tyranny of Twitter?

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:[9] "everything I saw, read, and heard was some sort of message to me that needed to be decoded.

"[14] 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.

[6] 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 didn't even know you had.

[6] The end credits of You Are Here ambiguously suggest the film may or may not include an accurate representation of American philosopher John Searle's ideas.

[17] In the Nayman interview, after Cockburn tells this story, he remarks that he forgot to credit Douglas Hofstadter who wrote Gödel, Escher, Bach, which was the source for the film's "headache" word puzzle.

In 2008, he received additional funding from the Canada and Ontario Arts Councils, which made it possible to go into production, though it was several months before he found a producer: "through a daisy-chain of meetings and recommendations," he met Daniel Bekerman, and immediately knew that his combination of experience and "practical know-how" combined with a deep understanding of alternative cinema made him "an ideal collaborator".

"[6] Looking back, he also found his personal journey mirrored in the process of making the film: I started writing it as a very intellectual pursuit, and through making it and collaborating ... all these people with all of their ideas, and these actors who gave human reality to these concepts that I had written down, that creative evolution from script to human movie is parallel to the journey of realizing that intellectual traps and thought patterns have an emotional underpinning.

"[21] London Angelis also voiced the unnamed infant character in The Bad Idea Reunion, a short film Cockburn also released in 2010.

"[3] Production designer Naz Goshtasbpour was given a working budget, that, according to Cockburn, "a lot of people in her position would have found laughable; but she managed to build a number of totally convincing sets entirely from scratch, and came up with ingenious solutions for slightly modifying locations to make them exactly what we needed.

"[17] Although Cockburn had spent the previous decade making short experimental films, this was not is original ambition: "You Are Here represents a return to my early desire to be a narrative feature-film director, but it's a strange, unorthodox way of storytelling which uses all the techniques I've been exploring in the last decade in service of creating a long-form emotional story experience for the audience.

"[9] Cockburn told Norman Wilner why this was done and that Toronto's relatively anonymous cityscape meant this was fairly easy to do:It was part of the concept of the movie that the audience isn't supposed to know when or where it's taking place...

Fairly early on, Cockburn and McNenly knew it had to be moved up because of its importance: "if someone comes in three minutes late after that lecture, in one sense you didn't miss anything...

[25][26] The Canadian premiere was held on 15 September 2010,[8] at the 35th annual Toronto International Film Festival,[27] in the Canada First section,[9] at the TIFF Bell Lightbox.

[15][note 5] It did not receive its limited release[47] in the U.S. until a premiere in New York City on 11 May 2012[48] (a one-week run at the reRun Gastropub Theater in Brooklyn).

[32] The Spanish DVD (2012, Cameo Media and Cine Binario, titled Usted Está Aquí) includes bonus content in the form of two short science fiction films by Madrid director Javier Chillon, Die Schneider Krankheit (2008) and Decapoda Shock (2011).

[52] The DVD cover is derived from an earlier promotional poster for the film based on a still from The Chinese Room showing Anand Rajaram drawing a red circle on glass and filling it to form a dot.

[11][57][46][58][36] Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan is quoted as calling the film inventive and multi-layered, and "a brilliantly organized first feature full of philosophical ideas and tremendous energy.

"[59] He elaborates on this in the preface to his interview with Cockburn, saying the film may be "the best film yet made about the cumulative effect that internet-saturation, YouTube, and Google Mapping have had on our world", and calling it "intellectually and emotionally exciting", admiring how Cockburn buries the present "in dated technology and nostalgia" which "only reinforces the skill with which You Are Here diagrams the contemporary flattening of time, space, and identity.

"[16] Leslie Felperin praised the "mostly unknown cast", who contributed "solid" performances: "Wright's part is the meatiest by far, and she brings an affecting vulnerability to her role as the confused archivist.

[9] Peter Howell's final word in his review for The Toronto Star is simply "Wow": "Meticulously conceived, shot and edited, it's Cockburn's first feature after a string of well-received shorts, and it's quite the calling card.

"[12] Francis Ouellette called it the most elusive and unique film to be presented at Fantasia Montréal in 2011, and a great discovery, a view he shared with festival organizer Simon Laperrière.

[60] Josef Woodard appreciates the tone and manner of "easy-going experimentalism, to ends which are somehow simultaneously contemplative and intellectually madcap", a film full of "conundrums, visual puns, and self-commenting ruses, hypnotic and seemingly non-linear but actually organized with a looping internal logic", with generous doses of self-effacing humor that "help the brainy business go down easily and even coaxes out a laugh or three.

"[4] At Era New Horizons, You Are Here was the film Ludwika Mastalerz "was rooting for the most", calling it "an amusing crash-course in analytical philosophy", admiring how "Cockburn flows freely from one abstract idea to the next.

"[64] Eli Glasner gives the film 3.5/5: "To be blunt, this movie's not for everyone, but stick with it to the end and some of the puzzle pieces finally fall into place.

Each story essentially arrives at the same purposefully irresolvable conclusion, and many of them are accompanied by narration that's performed in a drone that immediately grows tedious.