She is no stranger to New York, but French director Delphine Kreuter had never before shown her work to an American audience until her debut feature, "57,000 Kilometers Between Us," premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on Sunday night. "I think they liked it," shrugged Kreuter, who is widely noted as a photographer, video artist, and sometime collaborator of Christian Lacroix in her native France. "Sometimes, it's hard to tell." Her nonchalance notwithstanding, Kreuter's film betrays the bleeding heart that beats inside. The coolly observational, fractured, and slightly abstract "57,000" eventually reveals itself as a cri de coeur for genuine connection in the age of 24/7 connectedness. "The original idea came from seeing so many people online who totally expose themselves," explained Kreuter, whose story lines integrate video blogging, multiplayer gaming, and webcam flirtation. "But why do they do it? Who is it for? There's something very lonely about all that exposure." That said, the making of "57,000" hasn't kept her away from the Internet. "I get online to check e-mail," she said. "And then the next thing you know, an hour later I look at the screen and I think, how did I get here?"