THE STORY – Over the course of a single night in New York City, a collection of migrants, sex workers, dreamers and survivors move through the city’s digital underbelly, all searching for connection in a world that keeps them at its margins. From lonely video game server rooms to lip-filler beauty parlors, these non-actor subjects hustle and hope their way through an urban landscape that is at once indifferent and electric.
THE CAST – Krystaly Figueroa, Cheyenne Gallagher, Eddie Torrenegra, Caleb Zuzga & Emira D’Spain
THE TEAM – Joshua Z. Weinstein (Director/Writer) & Brian Perkins (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 91 Minutes
New York City has a reputation. It’s the concrete jungle where dreams are made of; if you can make it here, you’ll make it anywhere, etc. But when you live here, it doesn’t take long to realize that, true though the city’s reputation is, it’s not the whole truth. This city is a perpetual possibility, and not everyone can convert that potential into actuality. New York is a city of strivers, of dreamers, but it’s also a city of hustlers; you have to work hard and sometimes engage in questionable activities in order to make it here, and most people find themselves stuck in some kind of limbo between their dreams and what they can achieve, creating a kind of liminal space where you’re not fully living in the city in which you live. Joshua Z. Weinstein’s “Here I’m Alive” understands this better than most films, presenting a wholly unromantic vision of the Big Apple that nonetheless is brimming with love for its collection of desperate people longing to find their place in this unrelenting world.
Working with mostly non-professional actors found on TikTok, Reddit, Instagram, and other online forums, Weinstein and co-writer Brian Perkins developed storylines based on their real lives, creating a piece of docufiction that takes the audience on a nighttime odyssey from uptown underground studios to homeless shelters, from sweaty takeout kitchens to posh Village bars. This is the New York that locals know intimately but outsiders only rarely see, not so much the seedy underbelly of the city as the underseen parts of the city, the local haunts and unglamorous sidewalks that truly make New York what it is. Mostly, though, our subjects are trapped in a virtual world of glamorous Instagram reels, far-reaching Discord servers, and hyper-specific hook-up apps, constantly accosted by a stream of people either living their best lives or dangerously close to ending them. Bookended by a clip of Marc Andreesen reading from his “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” the film is as much an indictment of the ways technology has fractured our communities as it is an ode to how a giant city like New York can bring us together. The constant tension between the physical and online worlds feels like the film’s animating force, pushing the characters and the meager plot forward.
The anthology-esque format, with four largely unconnected stories told across only 81 minutes, unfortunately creates pacing issues. Most scenes are incredibly short, with some only including one or two lines of dialogue before cutting to another character’s story. This constant jumping around, combined with the film’s verité style that drops us into most characters’ lives in medias res with little backstory, makes it difficult to form an emotional connection to the characters. The disjointed storytelling can be frustrating, as it often feels like it’s cutting short our time with these characters, but each narrative comes through clearly in every scene. Each of our four POV characters – shelter resident and wannabe reality star Krystaly (Krystaly Figueroa), migrant delivery driver Eddie (Eddie Torrenegra), a shut-in technophile who’s only ever referred to by his screenname Majora (Cheyenne Gallagher), and a young gay boy trying to find a sugar daddy (Caleb Zuzga) – has a clear goal for the evening and a distinctive texture to their story that helps keep them separate, and the clear linear storytelling (title cards denote the passing of the hours) ensures that it’s impossible to lose one’s place in each story. Despite that incredibly short runtime, the film feels much longer, in large part because its storytelling is fragmented.
Reservations about the film’s structure aside, “Here I’m Alive” is as strong a cinematic city symphony as New York has seen in many a year. The sound design perfectly captures the city’s constant hum of background noise, and location shooting brings the city’s lesser-known areas to vibrant life. Set to a soundtrack of new songs by stars of the underground NYC music scene, Weinstein brings New York City nightlife to the screen in a way it never has before, getting inside the hidden, private, largely unknown sides of the city that only native New Yorkers see. It’s as unsentimental a love letter to the city as you can imagine, one that acknowledges the unlimited potential it offers while staying fully aware that most city residents are too plugged into their digital lives to ever wake up to the magic around them. By the time it reaches its final shot, New York City has come fully alive as both a setting and a character, quietly absorbing everything that we’ve just watched and incorporating it all into the soundtrack of a city that houses over 8.5 million. The problems of these four people may not amount to a hill of beans in this crazy city, but when there are millions of similar stories happening within one incredibly tiny piece of the world map, how can you not start to feel empathy for your fellow humans, just trying their hardest to make it in the sick, sad 21st-Century world? Imperfect though it may be, “Here I’m Alive” stands as a necessary reminder that all that glitters most definitely is not gold.
