D Is for Distance

‘The Cardinal and the Corpse' marks the beginning of Petit’s loose partnership with writer Iain Sinclair. There’s a nod towards narrative here involving a book-search launched by graphic novelist Alan Moore and a dealer (the dapper but barking Driffield), but it’s little more than an excuse to showcase a number of authors and other miscreants.

Asylum is a film very much derived from chaos, expressing implicitly the ideas conjured up by its title. A strange mix of both documentary and fiction, where in the future a group of people are looking back at the twentieth century. A virus has wiped out most of the culture of the twentieth century, leaving just fragments of a project called 'The Perimeter Fence' to be pieced together. These fragments make up a documentary about an exiled group of disparate yet similar minds.

A film essay on Ballard's fiction, and its unrealised cinematic potential, with particular reference to David Cronenberg's (yet to be filmed) Crash, featuring an interview with the director, prior to making of his film.

Smile, smile, smile - a witty and informal look at the life and times of the air hostess. Feature-film maker Chris Petit , of Radio On fame, turns his eye to the world of flying, "trolley-dollies", duty-free lives, emergency, sex and shopping. Cabin doors to manual! Welcome aboard!

A filmmaker sets out to make a voyage of discovery on London's orbital motorway, the M25. He enlists the help of several others to film the motorway from several points, drive endlessly around it and dig up stories and potential beauty behind the motorway.

A re-edit of Petit’s Radio On (1980)

A mini film-essay made up of CCTV footage.

While on vacation at a resort hotel in the West Indies, Miss Marple correctly suspects that the apparently natural death of a retired British major is actually the work of a murderer planning yet another killing.

A portrait of film critic Manny Farber, featuring interviews with Farber and art critic Dave Hickey, as well as inventively displayed clips of the films that Farber discusses.

40 Minutes was a BBC TV documentary strand broadcast on BBC Two between 1981 and 1994. The documentaries could be on any possible subject, the only connection being that they last forty minutes. Some documentaries in the original series were revisited and updated in a 2006 version, Forty Minutes On.

An American in West Berlin finds himself caught up in murder and intrigue after his associate is killed and a diplomat's daughter is found dead in his room.

A London radio DJ receives news of his brother's suicide and travels west to Bristol to find out more.

After finding her boss, a private detective, has committed suicide and has left her his agency, Cordelia Gray is asked to investigate the suicide of the man's son. During the course of her investigation, Cordelia becomes obsessed with the young man's memory and his increasingly suspicious death.

Content is an ambient 21st-century road movie, an associative film essay inspired by driving’s trancelike state rather than any linear unfolding of the road.

A collection of films from an eclectic array of contributors commissioned to raise funds for the Bristol independent cinema The Cube.

An abstract film, collecting together the 6 rooms Dave McKean made for Chris Petit to reshoot, cut-up, and generally abuse, in pursuit of images for his film 'Asylum', made in collaboration with the writer Iain Sinclair.