Australia’s Warwick Thornton Brings ‘Wolfram’ to Shanghai, Discusses Film’s Roots in Family History

Australian auteur Warwick Thornton attended a post-screening event at the Shanghai International Film Festival following the Chinese premiere of “Wolfram,” his latest feature, which was in the main competition of the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year.

Set in a 1930s Australian mining town, the film follows two Aboriginal siblings, Max and Kid, who are forced into child labor. When fugitives abduct Max, Kid sets off alone to find her brother, while their mother Pansy – newborn in tow – crosses the desert with her partner and a Chinese miner named Zhang in a bid to reunite her family.

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The project draws on Thornton’s personal history. Both his great-grandmother and his grandmother, who co-wrote the screenplay, were child laborers once compelled to dig for ore in the desert.

“This story matters a lot to me. It speaks to my roots, to who we are and where we come from, and it carries universal resonance for audiences worldwide,” Thornton said. His stated aim was to shed light on a chapter of Australian history that mainstream narratives have long neglected.

The director also spoke to the parallel suffering of Indigenous Australians and Chinese migrant workers under colonial rule. “Back then, Australia’s Indigenous peoples suffered brutal oppression under British colonizers, while Chinese migrant laborers faced equally harsh hardships at the same time,” he said. “If both communities endured such suffering side by side, why not tell a story about them standing up to it together?”

The film’s title refers to the mineral wolfram, which Thornton described as a key raw material in weapons manufacturing whose wartime price frequently eclipsed that of gold. “This lured major corporations into wolfram mining, driving them to exploit child labor – and ordinary locals had no choice but to bear the consequences,” he said.

Thornton shot the film himself. Producer Greer Simpkin noted that the swarms of flies visible throughout required no visual effects – the location was so badly infested that cast and crew regularly swallowed them during takes. Thornton, she said, treated the flies as an atmospheric element akin to rainfall.

On the soundtrack, Thornton said he minimized scored music in favor of letting the story generate its own emotional pull. The film’s closing piece, composed using a hand saw, was written to evoke the reunion between a mother and her children.

Thornton won the Caméra d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2009 for “Samson & Delilah” and the Special Jury Prize at the Venice International Film Festival in 2017 for “Sweet Country.”