After an impossible pregnancy throws her life into crisis, aspiring actor Rose escapes to the remote Crown Inn. But the hotel soon opens into something a lot stranger: a vibrant, dreamlike psychological landscape where time fractures, memories bleed into the present, and its unsettling residents seem to embody different parts of her fear, desire and trauma.

Drawing on the symbolic, psychological cinema of Ingmar Bergman and David Lynch, as well as the feverish colour of Dario Argento, I Live Here Now unfolds less like a conventional mystery than an immersive psychodrama about identity, generational trauma and bodily autonomy.

As Rose moves deeper through the inn’s shifting reality, she is forced to confront the parts of herself she has shut away—and reclaim ownership of a body others have tried to define for her.

Julie Pacino is an American filmmaker, producer and photographer based in Los Angeles. She studied filmmaking at the New York Film Academy and has worked across short films and independent feature production, including through the companies Poverty Row Entertainment and Tiny Apples.

Her short-form directing work includes Hard Work and Nowhere to Go. I Live Here Now marks her feature directorial debut and premiered at Fantasia International Film Festival in 2025 before screening at festivals including Locarno and Edinburgh.

The film continues Pacino’s interest in identity, trauma and psychological unease through a surreal genre framework.