Although 15years have passed since the British filmmaker Chris Petit released afilm, DIs for Distance sheds light on the reason: In his early teens, Petit’s son, Louis, began to suffer from asevere 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 awoman driving through adry landscape. Petit has ahistory with road movies: his 1979 Radio On is considered an essential British entry to the genre. Through transit, DIs for Distance develops into afree-associative collage that moves between home videos, medical encounters and fragments of Louis’ art visualising his epilepsy. It then shifts to alarger cultural inquiry into film history and political paranoia. As an attempt to map the distance between neurological traumas and atroubled wider world, the film draws on an abandoned project linking American author William Burroughs with former CIA chief James Angleton, which becomes aprism through which to explore Cold War anxieties, LSD-driven experiments of mind control and the shifting medical realities of epilepsy. It’s astrange 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.