Container #16: Petrol

In which we again remind everybody that our next screening is on a Monday.

Hello. Thank you once again for joining us.

Next Screening:
Petrol, Alena Lodkina, 2022, 95m
7pm Monday 27 March at The Elizabeth Picture Theatre
While scouting locations for a university project, Eva crosses paths with Mia; later, they meet again at a house party, and an intense friendship soon forms between the introverted student filmmaker and the inscrutable but magnetic performer. As the pair becomes ever more entwined, so does the supernatural begin to entangle with the everyday, revealing the cracks between memory and make-believe, reality and fantasy. All the while, Eva seeks to better understand her friend – and her own self – leading her deeper into the surreal rabbit hole that is Mia’s life.

While Alena Lodkina’s breakthrough and debut feature, Strange Colours was grounded in the form of observational realism, her latest, Petrol is assembled from loose fragments of reality: autobiographical notes, quotes from overhead conversations, played out on the field of Melbourne. Influenced by Rivette, Chytilova, Tarkovsky, and other directors, Lodkina embeds these fragments within a mesh of unstable images, symbolism and investigations into identity.

Introduced in-person by Alena Lodkina

Unrated 15+

With thanks to Arena Media

As always, free to all members (with membership available online or at the venue box office.)

Upcoming Screenings:
27 March: Alena Lodkina’s Petrol (and introduced by the filmmaker in person)
11 April: Jonathan Davies’ Topology of Sirens (pictured above)
25 April: Secret Screening (with Static Vision and with the filmmaker in person)
9 May: Ben Rivers’ Urthworks

Two interviews with Alena Lodkina (pictured above) on Petrol: One with Radio National’s Jason Di Rosso here and for those who don’t have the time for audio, with IF magazine here. Both see Lodkina go into detail on her influences and vision for Petrol.

Thank you. We look forward to catching next Monday for our screening of Petrol with filmmaker Alena Lodkina in attendance. And then (back to our usual routine) for our Tuesday 11 April screening for another Rivette-informed ‘city as playground’ film with Topology of Sirens. (With Jacque Rivette’s Celine and Julie Go Boating pictured above.)