An idealistic film student is drawn into a shadowy and intoxicating world when she befriends an enigmatic performance artist in writer-director Alena Lodkina's bewitching Melbourne-based drama PETROL.

While scouting locations for a university project, Eva (Bump’s Nathalie Morris) crosses paths with Mia. When they reconnect at a house party, 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.

Lodkina's vision of Melbourne is made otherworldly by the intrusion of ghosts, fate, ‘quantum entanglement’ and the occult. A lovechild of Round the Twist and David Lynch, PETROL summons the inherent mystique of youth and other people.