Here I’m Alive

Preceded by “Division”

ERIC SAYS Director Joshua Z Weinstein, perhaps best known to our audiences for the A24 drama Mensahe, returns with a very different vision of New York City, centered only a few miles—but also many light years—away from that prior film’s Hasidic community. Here Weinstein introduces us to a very 21st Century cast of characters, digital natives ranging from agoraphobic gamers to looksmaxxers in search of dating-app sugar daddies. Unfolding over the course of a single night in the Big Apple, Here I’m Alive is laced with biting humor and mounting tension akin to the Safdies at their best, while its intricately woven tapestry of vivid characters suggests P.T. Anderson at work with a neo-realist cast. It’s dynamically lensed and performed, impeccably populated by the next generation of old-school New Yorkers, and propelled by a soundscape bustling with street noise and the rhythms of cutting-edge hip-hop and spiritual jazz artists.

With this bravura pair of back-to-back features, Weinstein establishes himself as one of the foremost chroniclers of the alienated, subcultural corners of contemporary urban life. Here I’m Alive won a Special Jury Mention in the Narrative Competition at Tribeca; New/Next audiences have the chance here to be among the first audiences to experience what Indiewire’s David Ehrlich astutely termed “A microbudget Magnolia for the Age of hypernormalization.”