This article concerns the experimental study of heat and mass transfer in a distillation cell. This latter is a parallelepiped, of large form factor, whose active walls are vertical. The cell is fed with salt water, and pure water is evaporated from a thin film that falls along a heated wall while the opposite wall is maintained at a lower temperature and is used as a condensation surface. The experimental results show that the heat transfer in the distillation cell is dominated by the latent heat transfer associated with evaporation. A parametric study of the behavior of the distillation cell has been performed. A convenient choice of the operating parameters is suggested to optimize the distillation yield.