D is for Distance review – a free-associative,…

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.