Health care workers depicted in the film are portrayed by real medical professionals involved in HIV treatment and advocacy.[6]
Production
I Don't Know Who You Are marks the second film collaboration between filmmaker M. H. Murray and actor Mark Clennon.
Benjamin is a reprisal of the same character Clennon previously played in Murray's 2020 short film Ghost.[7] The screenplay is based in part on Murray's own experience having to navigate the health care system to attain PEP treatment after being sexually assaulted.[6]
The film was co-produced by Murray and Clennon, with Martine Brouillet and Victoria Long,[8] while Clennon and Long also served as story editors for the screenplay.[9]
The film was picked up for distribution after its TIFF premiere,[4] and later had a limited theatrical release in Canada and the United States in 2024.[5][11]
Barry Hertz of The Globe and Mail ranked the film 7th on his list of the top 10 Canadian films of 2023,[24] describing the film as "a tremendously tense portrait of small-scale desperation" and "a seriously impressive micro-budget debut".[25]
Adam Nayman, writing for the Toronto Star, called the film “deeply affecting” and wrote that "Murray's movie transforms its furtive production circumstances into a fully realized style. Instead of showing the city off, it cultivates a dizzy dislocation — the paranoid sensation of being surrounded at all times without necessarily feeling connected, or of anxious walks home under flickering street-lights."[26]
Vadim Rizov of Filmmaker Magazine felt that some scenes were “overly attenuated” but concluded that the film is "a solid feature debut" with “a strong sense of a particular micro-milieu."[27]
Angelo Muredda of Cinema Scope described the film as "an empathetic character study that effectively balances its punchy genre elements with its human drama."[28]
↑ Chambers, Bill (2023-09-13). "TIFF '23: I Don't Know Who You Are". FILM FREAK CENTRAL. Retrieved 2024-11-14. I thought a lot about Agnès Varda's Cléo from 5 to 7, of which this film is something of a micro-budget Canadian update, and how after Cléo receives a diagnosis that's serious but not the end of the world, a man tells her he wants to be with her, and she says he's with her right now.
↑ "I Don't Know Who You Are". TIFF. Retrieved 2024-11-14. Benjamin's increasingly fraught visits to his friends serve as a tour through the city's unspoken class system, shading in further aspects of his mounting anxiety; there are points in the film when it feels like we're watching a microbudget version of Uncut Gems (TIFF '19), with a frenzied protagonist trying so hard to hide his desperation and panic.
↑ "'I Don't Know Who You Are' Honours Those Who Fall Through the Cracks │ Exclaim!". 'I Don't Know Who You Are' Honours Those Who Fall Through the Cracks │ Exclaim!. Retrieved 2024-11-14. The frantic and tense nature of Benjamin's quest creates the edge-of-your-seat anxieties reminiscent of Josh and Benny Safdie's Uncut Gems. While the latter revolves around a man trying to cheat the system, I Don't Know Who You Are shows that it's far more difficult to simply exist within it.
↑ Heeney, Alex (2024-04-24). "Film Review: M. H. Murray's I Don't Know Who You Are". Seventh Row. Retrieved 2024-11-14. I Don't Know Who You Are, the first feature film from M. H. Murray, does for access to PEP what Never Rarely Sometimes Always did for abortion access.
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