Australian Western 'Wolfram' reclaims Aboriginal narrative at Berlin Film Festival

BERLIN – Australian director Warwick Thornton said on Tuesday that his new Western drama “Wolfram” marks another step in Aboriginal filmmakers reclaiming their narrative on the big screen.

“We’ve spent so much of our lives having our story being written by the coloniser,” Thornton told Reuters on the red carpet ahead of the premiere at the Berlin Film Festival.

“Now we have access to cinema and to song and dance, the bigger picture in Western media, and because of that we can actually tell our stories,” said the director, wearing a glittering Louis Vuitton suit that he said was a gift from Cate Blanchett, the leading lady of his previous film “The New Boy”.

He described being in Berlin, where his film is competing for the Golden Bear top prize, as a full-circle moment from his early days showing short films at the festival.

“I actually started believing in myself by getting into Berlin,” he said.

INSPIRED BY FAMILY STORIES

“Wolfram,” set in the 1930s, follows two children as they escape from a mining camp where they were forced to work and are pursued by two cruel outlaws on horseback across the outback.

“I’ve always loved the Western genre. And I don’t know if I’ve perfected it, but I just love making it,” said Thornton, whose 2017 “Sweet Country” also takes place in the Australian outback.

He said the film was based on the stories told by his own grandparents and also those of scriptwriter David Tranter, with Tranter drawing on the oral history he learned from his mother and grandmothers.

It was empowering “that he kept that inside him and he could actually turn that into a script”, said Thornton, who said that he himself could not remember anything about his grandmother.

“The indigenous people, we have an oral history. We don’t have a written history. So memory is really important to us.”