Petrol

Director: Alena Lodkina

2022 / 95min / DCP

Lodkina’s ensorcelling sophomore film, following up her much-lauded Strange Colours (2017), follows Eva (Nathalie Morris), an introverted young Russian Australian woman working on her thesis film project, as she falls under the spell of a capricious performance artist, Mia (Hannah Lynch), who invites Eva to move into her Melbourne apartment. As the duo become increasingly inseparable, Eva finds herself increasingly confronted with uncanny visions and eerie doublings, with Lodkina showing a preternatural ability to, through ingenious sound design, cinematography, and cutting, locate the otherworldly beneath the surface of the everyday. “As original as it is personal… Delivers wry, pinpoint satire about the cultural realm that it inhabits… Its ambiguities and its quizzical open-endedness is an open door to the cinematic future.” —Richard Brody, The New Yorker

Q&A with director Alena Lodkina, moderated by filmmaker Kit Zauhar, on Saturday, August 24th