Visual artist and photographer Delphine Kreuter previously made short films and is making her feature debut with 57000 KM Between Us. The film is about an adolescent French girl in a pleasantly dysfunctional family that is looking for itself and true feelings in cyberspace. Nat lives with her mother, mother’s new husband and her two little sisters, but we hardly ever see them together harmoniously. Nat prefers to chat from her scruffy attic with an unknown man who degenerates into truly regressive behaviour in front of his webcam and with a sick young friend who is forced to live in quarantine in a hospital. The webcam is also a lifeline between the sick son and his stiff mother, and between Nat and her father, with whom she’d prefer to live. Her stepfather does nothing but make home movies of his wife and the rest of the family to put on his website. Kreuter uses a loose narrative style filled with camera dynamics, a set filled with oversaturated colours and adults who almost outplay themselves. This provides a rather absurd and surrealist background to this modern allegory about growing up in a world that is dominated by means of communication, but that doesn’t do much in terms of real communication. When some characters meet each other whether they want to or not, Nat’s coming-of-age story takes a surprising turn.
