Sweet Country sees Australian filmmaker Warwick Thornton artfully tackle the Western, a genre well suited to examining issues of race and colonisation.<\/p>\n
“It was important that it ended that way, because it’s the truth,” Thornton says. “I’d be lying if Sam survived. It’d be bullshit for our history.”<\/p>\n
If the film’s brutal ending felt authentic, Thornton was also reluctant to go back for artistic reasons.<\/p>\n
“I always feel that the sequel is the death of something beautiful,” he says.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“That classic money-grab Hollywood’s notorious for. But the films I make don’t have much money.”<\/p>\n
Mighty Mailman<\/p>\n
So why did Thornton go back for Wolfram, the sequel that wasn’t meant to be?<\/p>\n
Turns out Sweet Country co-writers David Tranter and Steven McGregor are very persuasive. As are Bunya producers David Jowsey and Greer Simpkin.<\/p>\n
“They’re old mates,” Thornton says. “So they’re swearing at me, going, ‘Just read it’. And after putting the script down, I had a cigarette, rang them and said, ‘When are we making this?'”<\/p>\n
Picking up the narrative thread a few years later, Wolfram is centred on Philomac (Crazy Fun Park star Pedrea Jackson), the unrecognised son of cruel cattle station owner Mick (Thomas M Wright).<\/p>\n
![\"Two](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/b1723dc4127958c59de48a024b87b0c8.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
Wolfram stars Pedrea Jackson (left) who broke through as the title character in 2019 webseries Robbie Hood. (Supplied: Dylan River)<\/p>\n
“Mick is a man who treats his own son like a worker, because he doesn’t know any better,” Thornton says. “Thomas said to me, ‘I just want to give him [Jackson’s Philomac] a cuddle’. But I said, ‘No, the country won’t let you’.”<\/p>\n
Now a teenager, Philomac’s had enough of being treated like a slave, scarpering with Max (Hazel Jackson) and Kid (Eli Hart), two young First Nations folk he finds lost in the bush.<\/p>\n
This is the 1930s, and they’ve been stolen from their distraught mum, Pansy (the inimitable Deborah Mailman), a monstrous crime validated by government policy.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But Pansy, clutching her youngest to her chest, is determined to reunite with her stolen children, searching the Central Desert.<\/p>\n
“Deb is incredible,” Thornton says.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“Her physicality, as Pansy, is like an internal holding of a wound. With her little baby, she’s always got a collective connection to those other kids, but it’s a reminder that actually might be traumatising.”<\/p>\n
Pansy is aided by her Chinese lover, Zang (Jason Chong), a man who came to Australia for the Gold Rush and fell into her arms.<\/p>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/05fea5ee98cc77a254a1ba480ee204cd.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
Zang (Jason Chong) joins Pansy (Deborah Mailman) on her mission to recover her children. (Supplied: Dylan River)<\/p>\n
“We’ve got a lot of Aboriginal families that married Chinese or Afghan people, who came for the gold or the tungsten mines; a wonderful part of our history that isn’t always written,” Thornton says.<\/p>\n
It’s this hope, a mother refusing to give up on her children, finding solidarity in other communities also vilified by white Australia, that convinced Thornton: “I found the beauty in that.”<\/p>\n
Donkey chaos<\/p>\n
Wolfram is an astonishingly beautiful film, not least because Thornton is his own cinematographer, with one of the best eyes in the business, capturing the Central Desert’s majesty on a punishing shoot.<\/p>\n
“It’s Australia,” he says. “It tries to kill you all the bloody time, and it’s angry, but it’s incredibly beautiful. We couldn’t make an Aboriginal film in Texas.”<\/p>\n
Thornton loves the harshness of the desert light. “It’s brutal, but I grew up with it, and I work with it all the time. I understand it.”<\/p>\n
He also understood that you cannot tell a donkey \u2014 the one that bears Max and Kid, a biblical echo Thornton says was unintentional \u2014 what to do.<\/p>\n
“Mr Willoughby, who was our horse wrangler, told me, when he first rocked up, ‘Some days, donkey will wake up, and he’ll be donkey. And then other days, donkey will wake up and he won’t want to be donkey’,” Thornton says.<\/p>\n
![\"Two](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/6a8596e2e129feb0c8f80f9120d38edd.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
Max (Hazel Jackson) and Kid (Eli Hart) are stolen from their mum in Wolfram. (Supplied: Dylan River)<\/p>\n
“And that’s actually all I needed. It took away that pressure, that the donkey has to go left or right, take five steps and then have a piss. We just follow donkey wherever it goes.”<\/p>\n
Donkey’s unpredictable will is all part of Wolfram’s unruly charm, with a comic heart beating beneath the horror that underpins it in a way that Sweet Country couldn’t carry.<\/p>\n
“This comedy comes from survival,” Thornton says. “There is a future and redemption, some form of safety in Wolfram, and that was important. It’s an antidote to the poison you take from watching Sweet Country.”<\/p>\n
Wolfram is in cinemas from April 30.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kaytetye filmmaker Warwick Thornton doesn’t do sequels. Fast facts about Wolfram What: An unexpected sequel to 2018’s Sweet…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":637037,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[64,63,308339,134,4398,308344,308341,308342,308343,308340,250849,308338],"class_list":["post-637036","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-deborah-mailmail","tag-entertainment","tag-first-nations","tag-golden-bear","tag-indigenous-cinema","tag-pedrea-jackson","tag-samson-delilah","tag-sweet-country","tag-warwick-thornton","tag-wolfram"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=637036"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637036\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/637037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=637036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=637036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=637036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}