Alena Lodkina’s new feature film Petrol will have its North American Premiere as part of NYC’s New Directors/New Films (ND/NF). The film starring Nathalie Morris (Black Christmas, Bump) and Hannah Lynch, had its world premiere at Locarno International Film Festival, and its national premiere at the Melbourne International Film Festival.

In the mesmeric follow-up to her acclaimed debut, Russian-born, Melbourne-raised filmmaker Alena Lodkina casts an enigmatic spell of a movie centered around a film student named Eva (Nathalie Morris) and her fragmenting interior world. While working on a deeply personal school project connected to her Russian heritage, Eva meets the mercurial Mia (Hannah Lynch), a performance artist who runs hot and cold, and with whom she develops a close bond bordering on obsession. As Eva is drawn into Mia’s orbit, she comes increasingly to question her sense of reality, while at the same time making decisions about her own romantic, creative, and professional lives. Alternately whimsical and unsettling, Petrol is an entirely original vision, a film of moods as fluctuating as the weather, and a magical coming-of-age story that is also perhaps the tale of a haunting.

Petrol is Alena Lodkina’s sophomore feature following Strange Colours (2017), which premiered at the Venice International Film Festival.

Director Alena Lodkina said, “For me, Petrol is a film about a young woman’s search of self, the strange line between self and others, the vulnerability of youth. At a time of change and discovery, when one readily loses oneself in other people, the delicate line between reality and imagination can become blurred.”

Watch the international trailer for Petrol.