Thornton's 'Wolfram' Premieres in Shanghai After Berlin
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- Warwick Thornton attended a post-screening event at the Shanghai International Film Festival following the Chinese premiere of "Wolfram," which had competed in the main competition at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year.
- "Wolfram" is set in a 1930s Australian mining town and follows two Aboriginal siblings, Max and Kid, who are forced into child labor; when fugitives abduct Max, Kid sets off alone while their mother Pansy — newborn in tow — crosses the desert with her partner and a Chinese miner named Zhang to reunite the family.
- Thornton drew on his own family history, noting that both his great-grandmother and his grandmother (who co-wrote the screenplay) were child laborers once compelled to dig for ore in the Australian desert.
- Thornton explicitly framed the film around cross-colonial solidarity, saying: "If both communities endured such suffering side by side, why not tell a story about them standing up to it together?" — referring to the parallel oppression of Indigenous Australians and Chinese migrant laborers under British rule.
- The title "Wolfram" refers to tungsten, which Thornton described as a key raw material in weapons manufacturing whose wartime price eclipsed gold, driving major corporations to exploit child labor while "ordinary locals had no choice but to bear the consequences."
- Producer Greer Simpkin revealed that the swarms of flies visible throughout the film required no visual effects — the shooting location was so infested that cast and crew regularly swallowed insects during takes, with Thornton treating the flies as an atmospheric element akin to rainfall.
- Thornton 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 Pansy and her children.
Why it matters: By screening in Shanghai, a Berlin competition entry centered on the parallel suffering of Indigenous Australians and Chinese migrant laborers reaches one of the two communities it depicts, giving the film's cross-cultural solidarity thesis — rare in arthouse cinema — a direct audience and a measure of soft-power reciprocity through co-produced historical memory.
