Director: Delphine Kreuter
Principal Cast: Florence Thomassin, Pascal Bongard, Marie Burgun, Hadrien Bouvier, Stephanie Michelini, Mohamed Rouabhi
Screenplay: Delphine Kreuter, Mathieu Lis, Emmanuel Finkiel
Producer: Laetitia Gonzalez, Yael Fogiel
Editor: Valentine Borlant, Francois Gedigier, Delphine Kreuter
Sound Design: Nicolas Washkowski, Nicolas Gerlic
Director of Photography: Delphine Kreuter
Production Designer: Fabrice Lorrain

Though it may surprise viewers plunged into the film's disoriented universe, a bright streak of normality runs through 57,000 Kilometers Between Us. The debut feature from French photographer and video artist Delphine Kreuter tracks the daisy chain of relationships-some blood, some broadband-fanning out of one hyperactively dysfunctional family, and though this sounds like the red meat of many a "quirky" American indie, in Kreuter's hands the story feels disarmingly new. Her means are digital, her method purposeful randomness, her material aggressively au courant, seamlessly comprising transsexualism, global adoption, webcams, and multiplayer gaming. The plot is impossible to summarize. Eventually, however, 57,000 Kilometers coheres around a single theme, Kreuter's update to E.M. Forster's ageless plea: Only connect. As the film mucks around in the void between connecting, in the internet sense, and connection, in the human one, 57,000 Kilometers settles on a heroine-Nat, the 14-year-old daughter of Nicolas/Nicole (the aforementioned transsexual)-and Margot, a high-strung homemaker whose new husband, Michel, has drafted the immediate clan into his video blog project. Nat mostly keeps to her room, as much to steer clear of Michel's compulsive filming and posting as to further her two online flirtations. One, disturbing, is an instant-messaged back-and-forth between Nat and a man who likes to act like a baby (Mathieu Amalric, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly); the other, tender, is conducted via a video game with Adrien, a teenager dying in sterilized seclusion. Even his own mother can't bear to visit him. Though it's played out with a refreshing lack of sentimentality, the romance between Nat and Adrien emerges as the picture's heart-a heart Kreuter wastes no time in breaking.

-- Peter Scarlet

Delphine Kreuter (b. 1973, Lyon) studied modern literature and is an established photographer. In 1997, she showed her photographs for the first time in Berlin and at the renowned Alain Gutharc Gallery in Paris. The same year, she won the Paris Photo Prize. Kreuter has worked closely with Christian Lacroix and published four monographs. She is currently showing at the "J'embrasse pas" show at Yvon Lambert. She holds a Villa Médicis Hors Les Murs grant for 2008. A mixed media artist, Kreuter also works as a draftswoman, an illustrator, a video artist, and a filmmaker,and 57,000 Kilometers Between Us is her first feature.

Broadcast your life for anyone to see, on the Internet or on TV, for anyone to click onto, out of boredom or maybe just by accident. This is the basic idea. People need to show themselves, they need the means to show themselves and see themselves in the everyday privacy of their own homes—a phenomenon that has become an expression of the urge to live, a way of filling a gap, of dealing with loneliness and making oneself feel alive. People build virtual lives, above and beyond real life, in which Eternity seems somehow within reach long before death strikes. In these imaginary worlds, images stand in for God. Consciously or not, everyone does their best to make life more beautiful, and better than it is. Everyone is either an illusion, or the object of someone else's illusion. Hoping to make life bearable. "This sense of freedom, it's unbelievable," says one of the characters out boating on a stretch of river that slips under the highway. No outboard motor speeding out to infinity. Happiness is there. And it isn't. We make happiness and reinvent it, as we design our lives, our belief systems, and our practical arrangements to find some kind of sense of freedom wherever we can in the visual world nowadays.

This is my subject matter: the life force, the very human dependence on belief (even to the extent of self-deception), the vital energy involved in pulling one's life together, in devising or undertaking whatever it takes to find enjoyment. In parallel, the adults struggle and organize and sometimes what they do verges on the absurd or on the insane—when it escapes them. And then: Nat. She has her own system, unconscious and abrupt, playful and sincere. Nat runs at life, but always it seems to slip out of her grasp. She is so young that the business of surviving, day in and day out, leaves her looking wide-eyed. "Us, we'll never die," she proclaims.

Wrong. Within a couple of days and nights, her illusions are shattered. Truth and reality reassert themselves. Characters step out from behind their screens, step out from their homes. And as they come face to face with each other, they must face up to themselves. So different to what they hoped for and wanted and believed, different to their childhood or adult dreams. Painful, yes. But throughout this story, pleasure and pain are inextricably combined, the one meaningless without the other: In the world I want to describe, pleasure and pain are colors.

It's a flawed yet colorful world, in which settings stand as characters and ideas. And then, for Nat and Adrien's outing, as she touches everything he can only see behind glass or across a screen, the vision turns sensual. The structure is like a network, bringing the various characters and events into poetic contact with each other. In the end, the story hones a multitude of lives into a single movement that encompasses and connects them all.