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Written and directed by Alena Lodkina, Petrol arrives On Demand on October 15th, courtesy of Indican Pictures, and we have an exclusive preview, along with a look at the film's new poster.

"The chilling psychological drama, Petrol, will captivate audiences with its atmospheric and deeply reflective exploration of friendship, identity and the flimsy boundary between reality and imagination when it arrives On Demand on October 15 from Indican Pictures. Following her acclaimed debut Strange Colours, Alenda Lodkina once again delivers a visually arresting and psychologically charged indie film that offers a fresh, bold voice in contemporary cinema.

Petrol follows the story of Eva, a film student in Melbourne, whose fascination with the enigmatic artist Mia draws her into a world where the line between art and life begins to blur. As the two women’s lives intertwine, Eva’s journey becomes one of self-discovery, navigating the complexities of identity and the...

Exclusive: Indican Pictures has acquired North American rights for Australian filmmaker Alena Lodkina’s fantasy thriller Petrol about the unsettling friendship between a shy film student and an alluring performance artist with a troubled past.

The film originally world premiered at Locarno’s Filmmakers Of The Present competition in 2022, and then enjoyed a buzzy North American premiere at the Lincoln Centre and MoMA’s New Directors/ New Films Festival earlier this year.

Indican Pictures co-founder Randolph Kret negotiated the deal with UK-French film company Alief, with the latter reporting that the distribution company had beaten bids from two other key indie players on both price and its release plans which include a theatrical component.

“Indican Pictures has acquired Petrol, an intense and intoxicating performance piece that is set to be released in 2024,” said Kret.

One of the draws of the film for international buyers is co-star Nathalie Morris, lead of...

Winnie Cheung’s “Residency,” which has its world premiere in the Bright Future section of Intl. Film Festival Rotterdam, has debuted its trailer (below). Alief is selling the film, which is a “haunting metafictional tale about female artists pushed beyond their limits at a cursed artist residency.”

The film, set at New York artists’ studio The Locker Room, is described by Alief’s Miguel Angel Govea as “an adventurous take on the final girl horror trope.” It is a “hybrid feature dancing between fiction and non-fiction norms that plays like a punk rock cover of Gaspar Noé’s ‘Climax.'”

Cheung commented: “Rather than representing women as sexualized victims through the traditional lens of male fantasies, I’m exploring the real horror behind the anxiety of being a female artist, which is often mixed in with pleasure, delirium and joy.”

Cheung was the editor and one of the producers of “Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched,...

Stockholm-based Njuta Films has boarded Hannes Þór Halldórsson’s “Cop Secret,” snagging theatrical rights to Scandinavia after a bidding war at the American Film Market.

The film, produced by Iceland’s Pegasus Pictures, was recently nominated for the European Film Award as best comedy alongside Fernando León De Aranoa’s “The Good Boss” and Catherine Corsini’s “.”

This marks yet another score for the film’s sales agent Alief as it bows another title 0n its sales slate, “Petrol,” at the Marrakech Film Festival.

A comedic actioner about a troubled “supercop” Bússi (Auðunn Blöndal) – who starts to question his sexuality after being assigned a new partner, Hörður (Egill Einarsson) – “Cop Secret” has received plenty of attention following its Locarno premiere in 2021, also due to Reykjavík-born helmer’s unusual background: Hannes Þór Halldórsson used to be a professional football goalkeeper and member of Iceland’s national team.

“When I was making ‘Cop Secret,...

Exclusive: UK-French film company Alief has secured international sales rights to Australian filmmaker Alena Lodkina’s second feature Petrol, following its buzzy world premiere in Locarno’s Filmmakers Of The Present competition.

The Melbourne-set drama, co-stars Nathalie Morris as an impressionable film student of Russian origin who falls under the thrall of an enigmatic performance artist, played by big screen newcomer Hannah Lynch.

The pair move in together and their lives become more and more entwined, with Morris’s character embarking on a voyage of self-discovery played out between reality and her imagination.

Morris is best known internationally for her starring role in Stan’s Australian teen pregnancy series Bump, which premieres in North America on CW Network this month and was acquired for the U.K. by the BBC.

Petrol was the first Australian feature film to play in competition at Locarno since Clara Law’s Floating Life in...

Alena Lodkina’s first feature, “Strange Colours” (2017) took her deep into the Australian outback, to the rough-as-guts opal-mining town of Lightning Ridge, before bringing her to the Venice Film Festival, where the film premiered. It augured a distinctive new mood in Australian cinema – understated but keenly observed; a little sinister – as represented in recent editions of Rotterdam (David Easteal’s “The Plains”; James Vaughan’s “Friends & Strangers”) and Cannes (Thom Wright’s “The Stranger”).

Her second feature, produced by Kate Laurie at Arenamedia and funded by Screen Australia, VicScreen, the Melbourne International Film Festival Premiere Fund, Sbs, and Orange Entertainment, takes its bow at the 75th Locarno Film Festival.

In the evasively-titled “Petrol,” the Russian-born filmmaker turns her gaze towards the city she calls home: the film ascribes a certain kind of decadent mystique to Melbourne, where Lodkina has lived for the last 10 years. “You don’t see cities portrayed in Australia that much,...

Petrol Review — Petrol (2022) Film Review from the 75th Annual Locarno Film Festival, a movie written and directed by Alena Lodkina and starring Nathalie Morris, Hannah Lynch, Daniel Frederiksen, Natalia Novikova, Alex Menglet, Ganda Marpaung and Intan Kieflie. There’s not a lot that one can learn in film school if one doesn’t already have [...]

Continue reading: Film Review: Petrol: A Thought-Provoking and Ambiguous Tale of Imagination [Locarno 2022]...