Only medical cannabis can stop Louis’ epileptic seizures, but the NHS refuses to supply it. Chris Petit and Emma Matthews have turned their fight into a film

That uniquely valuable British writer and independent film-maker Chris Petit, creator of downbeat classics such as Radio On from 1979 and An Unsuitable Job for a Woman from 1982, may not these days find it easy to get an outlet for his work; this would be appear to be his first feature credit for 15 years. But he and co-director, editor and partner Emma Matthews have emerged with a deeply personal movie: painful, complex, challenging and engaging.

Petit and Matthews riff and free-associate on the themes of memory, memory-loss and the moving image on video and celluloid, but at the centre of this is an urgent story from their own lives. In his early teens, their son Louis, now 22, a talented artist and musician, began to have epileptic seizures that wiped out his memories of childhood; some of these were of the type nicknamed “Alice in Wonderland” syndrome because of the resulting misperceptions of time and space – though these were scary, oppressive and brutal experiences very different from the beguiling world of Lewis Carroll.