Wolfram

Source: Adelaide Film Festival

‘Wolfram’

Adelaide Film Festival (AFF) has revealed the full lineup of its 2025 edition, which includes 10 competition titles and will close with the world premiere of Warwick Thornton’s Wolfram.

The festival, set to take place in the capital of South Australia from October 15-26, will comprise 123 films from 27 countries, including 27 world premieres.

These include Wolfram by Indigenous Australian filmmaker Thornton, which follows his acclaimed 2017 feature Sweet Country, winner of Venice’s special jury prize and Toronto’s Platform award. Set in the 1930s, Wolfram is a frontier western where Aboriginal child labourers in the mines confront colonial brutality and injustice.

A further world premiere is Dario Russo’s The Fox, starring Emily Browning, Jai Courtney and Damon Herriman. Supported by the Adelaide Film Festival Investment Fund, the film is a darkly comic folktale of an ordinary man and the fox who offers to solve all his problems.

The five titles in AFF’s Feature Fiction Competition includes A Useful Ghost, the grand prize winner at Cannes’ Critics’ Week, by Thai writer/director Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke; Austria-Slovakia film Perla by Alexandra Makarová; ghost story Phantoms Of July by Germany’s Julian Radlmaier; Reedland by Dutch director Sven Bresser, which also played in Critics’ Week; and Mexican film Vanilla from director Mayra Hermosillo

The Feature Documentary Competition comprises Cast Off by Germany’s Julian Wittman, about an octogenarian sailor; North South Man Woman by Christina Sun Kim and Morten Traavik, which explores a matchmaking business that pairs women from North Korea with men from the South; Gar O’Rourke’s Sanatorium, centred on a facility in Odesa; Parsifal Reparato’s She, chronicling Vietnamese women factory workers; and The Tale Of Silyan, in which Oscar-nominated Honeyland director Tamara Kotevska follows the friendship between a North Macedonian farmer and a wounded white stork.

This year’s jury, which oversees both competitions, is led by Murray Bartlett, the Emmy Award-winning Australian actor known for The White Lotus. He will be joined by First Nations director Jub Clerc; Pavel Cortés, director of programming for the Guadalajara International Film Festival; UK-Australian filmmaker Marion Pilowsky; and Australian writer/director John Sheedy.

As previously announced, Sophia Hyde’s Jimpa, starring Olivia Colman, John Lithgow and Aud Mason-Hyde, will open the festival.

Further highlights include Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein and Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia, both fresh from Venice, Hikari’s Rental Family, which premiered at Toronto, and Scott Cooper’s biopic Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere.

Mexico will be the subject of this year’s country spotlight at the festival and will include competition title Vanilla as well as J. Xavier Velasco’s Crocodiles, Aria Covamonas’ The Great History of Western Philosophy and Victoria Franco’s Twelve Moons.

AFF’s retrospectives programme will include a tribute to film critic David Stratton, who died in August, with a presentation of his favourite film, Singin’ In The Rain.

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