Anticipation.
We’re interested to see how Petit and Matthews engage with the idea of “post-cinema”.
Enjoyment.
Despite a palpable emotional weight, all these threads seldom resonate together.
In Retrospect.
A psychogeographical exercise that creates the distances in which to contemplate its shifts of emphasis.
Louis Petit’s experience of epilepsy marks the starting point for filmmakers Christopher Petit and Emma Matthews to embark on a wider, formally adventurous effort.
Although 15 years have passed since the British filmmaker Chris Petit released a film, D Is for Distance sheds light on the reason: In his early teens, Petit’s son, Louis, began to suffer from a severe form of epilepsy that wiped out the memory of his childhood. This led to Petit and his wife, the film’s co-director Emma Matthews, dedicating themselves to fighting for the care that Louis needs against an inflexible, bureaucratic healthcare system.
The film opens on the road, with a woman driving through a dry landscape. Petit has a history with road movies: his 1979 Radio On is considered an essential British entry to the genre. Through transit, D Is for Distance develops into a free-associative collage that moves between home videos, medical encounters and fragments of Louis’ art visualising his epilepsy. It then shifts to a larger cultural inquiry into film history and political paranoia. As an attempt to map the distance between neurological traumas and a troubled wider world, the film draws on an abandoned project linking American author William Burroughs with former CIA chief James Angleton, which becomes a prism through which to explore Cold War anxieties, LSD-driven experiments of mind control and the shifting medical realities of epilepsy. It’s a strange gambit that doesn’t entirely pay off, the dense web of associations occasionally derailing the gravitas of an otherwise grounded film about the fragility of memory and identity.
