As Warwick Thorton said in the press conference during Berlinale, “Welcome to the Indigenous Western, and welcome to Indigenous Cinema. It’s such a beautiful place.”
Wolfram is a follow-up to the 2017 multi award- winner and festival darling Sweet Country, and while some characters get a comeback and the setting is still the hot red centre of Australia, what audiences get that’s different is a story of survival, indigenous ingenuity, and hope and humour when the chips are down.
Wolfram is another word for tungsten, and in 1930s Australia mining the ore was a hot ticket to fortune, and communities sprung up around the action. During the film there’s mention that the going rate for wolfram is decreasing, and prospectors wonder if they should switch to looking for gold. Its an echo of the fragility and makeshiftness of societies and incomes out in the desert, when laws are loose and life is cheap, and a dead horse rots in the centre of town, seemingly nobody’s responsiblity to clean up.
Leaning on classic Western tropes, director Warwick Thornton tells an all- Australian story, and re-informs the history books in the process, with a narrative drawn directly from oral testament given to the screen writer David Tranter.
Directed by: Warwick Thornton
Screenplay by: Steven McGregor, David Tranter
Cinematography: Warwick Thornton
Edited by: Nick Meyers
Produced by: Greer Simpkin, David Jowsey
Co-produced by: Drew Bailey, David Tranter
Premiered at Berlinale 2026
In Competition
Starring: Deborah Mailman, Erroll Shand, Joe Bird, Thomas M Wright, Matt Nable, Pedrea Jackson, Eli Hart, Hazel May Jackson, Ferdinand Hoang, Jason Chong, Aiden Du Chiem, John Howard, Anni Finsterer, Luka May Glynn Cole, Gibson John, Natassia Gorey-Furber
Pansy, played with quiet fortitude by Deborah Mailman, is heading out of the fictional town of Henry, with her new baby and her Chinese partner Shi, played by Ferdinand Huang. She’s leaving an abusive relationship and her other children behind, although she has a plan, and her equal longing and powerful connection to Country is the the thread that pulls the film together.
Two of her kids are child labourers Max (Hazel May Jackson) and Kid (Eli Hart), who finding themselves away from the grasp of their slave-master Billy (Matt Nable), go on their own quest for freedom. They team up with the magnetic Philomac (Pedrea Jackson) who starts off brooding over the cruel whitefella Mick Kennedy (Thomas M. Wright) he lives with, but comes to take matters into his own hands.
Jackson has recently collaborated with Thornton in the powerful PSA Change Direction, and Thornton rightly lets the camera linger on this superstar on the rise.
The baddies who roll into town looking for trouble are Casey (Erroll Shand) and Frank (Joe Bird), and what’s powerful in Wolfram is that the indigenous protagnosists face down the two-bit gangsters, despite their far greater horsepower and gunpowder, to give as good as they get.
Chinese came to mine the land during this era looking for the same fortunes as everyone else, and its a part of the Australian Outback story that is often missed. In Wolfram it is these Chinese miners that offer a version of sanctuary to the heroes, albeit in return for work, possibly a metaphor for the complicated position in which modern- day Australia finds itself in the face of an aggressive white supremacist culture on the other side of the Pacific.
As in much of his previous work, Thornton is also the cinematographer, and there is no-one better to capture the sizzling sun-beaten landscape of the Outback, showcasing all its beauty and danger and delicacy. Country and animals feature evocatively in the drama, from the constant buzz of the flies, which he cleverly sometimes turns up the volume of, to minature tadpoles dancing around in their new- life excitement, and a camera-ready Grey Fantail bird that flies in for a star turn. The sunsets and sunrises lead the way in a hot palette that stays true throughout the film, of hot yellow and reds and oranges, that burn up the landscape, and cover the blood and gore that necessarily peppers the movie.
We captured some of the press conference at Berlinale when cast and crew added more insights into the making of the film, that is no doubt going to cut through in multiple territories, and instantly hit hero status back home.
Director Warwick Thorton on what attracted him to the script.
“Sweet Country, which I completely love, is the best script ever, but it is a brutal film- a tough, tough, hard one to watch. It had a lot to say about us as indigenous people, and our history, and what was written about us by our colonising conquerers. They had the pen, and we didn’t. It had to be tough because of the truth- telling we were trying to do.”
So when Greer came to me and said David and Steven had written a new film called Wolfram, I thought I didn’t really want to make a sequel to Sweet Country. But then David persuaded me. It does have redemption – the characters are not victims, they’re survivors, and they’re incredibly beautiful. So, as soon as I read it, I just rang Jowsey and Greer, and said- ‘I’m in!'”
“This film is about our grandparents. David and I have known each other since we were six, and our tribes are physically close to each other on the land in Central Australia. Our great-great- grandmothers had these really close ties, and the film is about the things that were happening to them at that time. David has this amazing memory of what he’s been told by his mother and grandmothers, about where they worked, and who they worked for, how they were stolen, he remembers all these stories. I’m ‘forgetful Jones’ and I can’t remember anything about my grandmother, so that was really empowering to me that David had those memories, that oral history that he kept inside him, and that he could actually turn into a script. It’s really special, and as indigenous people, we don’t have a written history, we have an oral history. Memory is so important to us, so turning the memories into a film was a beautiful process for me.”
Deborah Mailman (Pansy) on her character’s strength and narrative arc
“It was a privilege for me, because this is the story of many women – this was their reality and this was their life. With a character such as Pansy, she represents what many generations of women endured. I remember at the beginning of the shoot with Warwick, very few words were spoken. It was just, ‘Survival. Pansy’s survival.’
The whole story is a really very simple for Pansy. She’s finding her kids and she’s trying to bring her family back together again. It’s as simple, but as deep and as heartbreaking as that. It’s beautiful to have that arc, that narrative. She doesn’t know where she’s going to end up. She doesn’t know if she’s going to find them. And from here to there, a lot happens. There’s always that threat. There’s always that danger. She’s being thrown around like a rag- doll from one traumatic event to another, but she’s still around, but her only thing is to get her kids back. It’s a fantastic story arc.”
Screenwriter Steven McGregor on how the script was developed and getting the film made.
“I do remember that Warwick refused to read it. He said, ‘I don’t do sequels.’ And I said, ‘Read it, Warwick!’ I knew we’d get him across the line, because it is a beautiful story. David and I have a unique relationship. He has all these ideas and stories, and it’s about me accessing that brain of his, and just putting it on the page, and then from there, we have a position from which we can shape the story and characters. I really like working that way. We went through multiple drafts, and then Warwick came on board, and had a whole lot of ideas, and wanted to change it all, and we said, ‘No, no, no, no.’ As Warwick said, Sweet Country was a brutal film, and with this story, we wanted a sense of redemption, and for the audience to go, ‘Ah!’ and exhale, rather than tense up and say ‘Oh my God!'”
Thomas M Wright (Mick Kennedy) and working with the rest of the filmmakers and his characters motivations.
“These are really special projects to be a part of. They don’t feel like anything else – going out to the Central Desert and working with David and Greer, working with this whole team, it is really very special. Warwick and I didn’t really talk much on this film. We sort of checked in with each other at the beginning of the day, but otherwise we really just played. As Warwick said, Sweet Country was a very tough film, but the fact is, making it wasn’t tough. The people were doing the exact opposite of what that film is about- we were coming together and trying to transcend some of those things that the film is dealing with.”
“There was a moment during the shooting of Wolfram, and I don’t think either of us had anticipated it from the script, but I turned to Warwick a few days in and said, ‘I’m starting to realise that I just want to go forward and pick up my kid and give him a hug.’
And Warwick said, ‘Yeah, but the Country won’t let him.’
And both of us just turned around and walked away from each other, and we never really talked about the character again from that point.”
Warwick Thorton on his connection to Westerns
“Alice Springs where I grew up, is in the desert, so we just loved Westerns. We watched The Good, The Bad, The Ugly, and How The West Was Won one? Soldier Blue was one of the films where we realised that we’re the Indians!”
“That epiphany as a teenager, was a great way of seeing who you are, and where do you stand. Are you at the front of the bus or the back of the bus? You know, we’re always at the back of the bus. We liked the back of the bus.”
“Those directors of films like The Searchers, seemed to be lamenting a past, and something had disappeared in their lives. But in Alice Springs, the ‘West’ was still real- we were living it. People were riding horses up and down the street, drunk. There were still guns. And there was a lot of racism. David and I were living the ‘West’ as children, so it was a weird connection to Westerns.”
“A couple of years ago, we had another epiphany about an indiginous point of view of what a Western could be. The Searchers is all about the veranda, and looking out at the wild lawlessness, and the savages who are over the hill, or in the forest. You stay on your veranda, or on your ranch, and the veranda is the barrier. If you step off that veranda, you’re in a different territory, and its a dangerous place that’s evil and scary and full of savages that have no law.”
“As an indigenous filmmaker, making a Western, my point of view is in the forest, or on the mountains, looking at that veranda and seeing that as dangerous and scary. We’re looking from the forest at the ranch or the house and saying ‘This is strange. We don’t do it that way. It looks like there’s no law there'”
“It’s a different perspective of the same world.”
Warwick Thorton on blow flies
“We had a fly plague. And 40,000 blow flies can’t be wrong! They helped toughen up the film. Even flies need backlight. All the actors get backlit, so why can’t the flies-they look better with it!”
“I was breathing in about 15 flies a day. For the first couple of days of the shoot, I was trying to spit them out, and the poor little darlings would be in your saliva, struggling on the ground. By the fourth day, it was just too hard to cough them up, so you just swallowed the flies and got on with it.”
“The hardest thing was that they were crawling all over the lenses. If they were moving it was okay, but if they stopped it made the lens look dirty. The poor old focus pullers and loaders would just be mortified because the lens looked really dirty. So the only thing we would do is if the flies were crawling we’d keep rolling, but if one stood still, we’d do another take.”
“We weren’t making a commercial for butter, we were making a hard- ass film that has its roots in survival and struggle, so I said, ‘Bring the flies on!'”
“Every time a horse would shit another billion flies would turn up. And there was one scene, I remember clearly, when none of the horses did a shit. The continuity was all wrong. So we actually went and got some horseshit and put it in the scene so the flies would turn up.”
Warwick Thorton on the politics of film.
“What is really clear that four of us up here on this stage are Aboriginal. Over the last 200 years our families have been, through colonisation, subjected to murder, rape, poisoning, genocide, stolen generations, and authorities trying to breed the blak out of us by stealing our children. Us actually being here is a political statement. We are a political statement.”
