A profoundly moving and astonishing portrayal of a young man’s experience of Epilepsy.
D is for Distance is a strange, beautiful meditation on memory, truth and family, bound with tender fragility around the experiences of a young man with epilepsy, tracing his story from pre-condition to the current day.
The young man, Louis Petit, is the son of Chris Petit and Emma Matthews, both filmmakers and the directors of the film. It is a proliferation of different materials, from home videos of Louis taken by his mother as she tracks his seizures on the advice of doctors, to old cartoon clips, other old cinema clips and family travel footage. The glories of the artistic imagination seed out of the stark reality of the home video material, including some of Louis’ own artistic work. His paintings reflect the hallucinations that were a side effect of seizures during his adolescence, creating perplexing dreamscapes on his canvases.
When Louis has his first seizure as a young boy, the family embark on a journey into confusion and fear around his life-threatening condition, worsened by the ineptitude of the NHS doctors treating him with misprescribed medication. The film slips between materials with the same slipperiness as the condition, with its unnerving uncertainty, its terrifying unpredictability.
One result of Louis’ seizures is a loss of childhood memories, lending a pathos to the footage before his condition asserted itself, and there is a sense that this loss of memory is tied to a loss of innocence for the family as a whole, as his condition draws a stark line between before and after. The film is heartbreaking in its vulnerable probing into the secrets of the subconscious: what can be found, perhaps through art, and what is lost forever.
This loss of innocence is also portrayed in the parent’s dawning awareness of the ‘hubris and bureaucracy’ of a broken medical system. The NHS refuses to provide the medical cannabis medication that alleviates the symptoms, leading to the necessity of procuring it from Europe with the attendant financial anxiety.
As the film slips between materials, so does it meld Louis’ story with Petit’s own unfinished film project, centered around the American artist and writer William Burroughs and the former CIA chief James Angleton. Petit’s interest in the subconscious manifests here in the study of addiction and paranoia, and with minds that shared a fascination with secretive systems of control and surveillance. The film circles around the mystery surrounding Angleton’s suspect activities whilst working within the CIA, grasping at a mind muddied between truth and lies.
The film is narrated with calm lucidity by Jodhi May, whose third-person narration gives this story a calming throughline, amongst the beautiful disorder of material. Rich with imagery, music and seamless yet surprising material slippage, the film nonetheless imbues a sense of peace and hope within suffering, that lingers after both nightmare and dream have passed away.
D is for Distance will be released in UK and Irish cinemas on 3 April 2026 by BFI Distribution. A BFI Player release will follow on 11 May. See the new trailer here