D Is for Distance (Finnish premiere) (in the presence of Chris Petit, Mika Taanila and Olaf Möller)

 

Chris Petit & Emma Matthews: D Is for Distance (FI 2025). Louis Petit on a fell in Lapland. Foto Jussi Eerola.

Sodankylän Elokuvajuhlat / Midnight Sun Film Festival (MSFF) 2025.

In the presence of Chris Petit, Mika Taanila and Olaf Möller.

Viewed at the Big Top, 14 June 2025.

IMDb: "A film essay montage of contemporary footage, archive and cinema history, about the age of post-truth and how one young man's childhood epilepsy became representative of the woes of the world and how he triumphed against adversity."

Olaf Möller (MSFF 2025): "Fifteen filmless years have passed since Content (if we ignore Petit’s minute contribution to the omnibus The Film That Buys the Cinema, 2014). But in a certain way, Petit was always busy with it, as Emma Matthews and he were raising their son, Louis, who suffers from a gruesomely debilitating form of epilepsy that wiped out his whole memory of childhood."

"Obviously, they weren’t thinking about cinema while doing their best as parents, and they surely didn’t see Louis as the future protagonist of a film; and Discontent, as D Is for Distance was originally to be called, was anyway supposed to be something quite different: a paranoid politics speculation not unlike the performance project Museum of Loneliness presents Lee Harvey Oswald’s Last Dream (2014). But then it became another road movie, this time Finland-bound, during which the parents remember the tribulations of their son’s younger years through video they taped while creating together new memories in reality as well as on data cards for a future unknown."

"Many other subjects get mentioned, but what one remembers most in the end is that small family trying so hard to live decently in a world that has turned pernicious." Olaf Möller

FINLAND, 2025. DIRECTOR: CHRIS PETIT, EMMA MATTHEWS. SCREENPLAY: Chris Petit, Emma Matthews • CINEMATOGRAPHY: Jussi Eerola, Emma Matthews, Chris Petit • EDITING: 

Emma Matthews • SOUND: Olli Huhtanen • MUSIC: Rio Harada-Parr • CAST: Jodhi May, Chris Petit, Louis Petit • PRODUCTION: Testifilmi • PRODUCERS: Mika Taanila, Jussi Eerola, Ida Karakoski • PRINT SOURCE: Testifilmi • FORMAT: DCP • LANGUAGE: englanti/English • SUBTITLES: no subtitles • 85 min

    International festival premiere: 1 Feb 2025 Rotterdam.

    A marvellous oldies soundtrack:

- Johannes Brahms: "Wiegenlied" (1868)

- Florida Normal and Industrial Institute Quartette: "Dis Train" (Is Bound for Glory) 1922

- Ernest V. Stoneman: "The Titanic" (1924)

- Harry McClintock: "Red River Valley" (1928)

- Cab Calloway: "St. James Infirmary Blues" (1933) in: Dave Fleischer: Betty Boop in Snow White

- Dimitri Tiomkin (comp.) & Paul Francis Webster (lyr.): "My Rifle, My Pony and Me" (tune from Red River, lyrics from Rio Bravo)

AA: Chris Petit's D Is for Distance is a shatteringly personal road movie. No longer a saga about the alienation of the protagonist, this time the journey is about the parents' quest to help their son Louis Petit who is coming to terms with a unique and vicious case of epilepsy and malpractice after a dangerous drug destroyed the his memory and identity.

 

It is an associative montage film that combines home movies, a road movie structure and a run of early cinema samples (Edwin S. Porter, Georges Méliès).

All comes together in a dream flow. We move in a zone between the conscious and the unconscious. We hear the majestic surge of the sea. We fly as pioneers in a deep inner space. 

We learn about drugs. Clobotsan. Bedrolit. Cannbiszon. We learn about paranoia: William S. Burroughs vs. George Orwell. We learn about the CIA spymaster James Jesus Angleton, chief of the counterintelligence department of the Central Intelligence Agency, himself suffering from paranoia. CIA's experimental methods and illegal tests with mind-altering drugs are discussed.

Analogue boredom and digital boredom are among the topics. The image bank has exploded. AI has no goosebumps, no fear, no excitement. In the grand post-digital mess, Burroughs is preferable to Orwell who has no sense of the pleasure principle.

Art, such as the paintings of the German Renaissance master Matthias Grünewald, help make sense of the hallucinations from bad medicine.

The road movie takes us way up North, passing through Sodankylä, to the top of a high fell. This road movie is not about the destination. The journey is the destination.

The paintings and drawings of Louis Petit are fabulous. I look forward to a monograph exhibition.