Wolfram (M, 100 minutes)

While this outback drama is one of a growing number of stories on screen about Indigenous dispossession, it is also a tale of hope. This is another chapter in the history of the Stolen Generations, a story that does not generally deliver uplift, but it ends well, with a rising inflection. It's a bold move.

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There are vast tracts of country, sweet or otherwise, captured in sweeping vistas by director and cinematographer Warwick Thornton. Back from the coast, where he set his television series The Beach, he has returned to country, his homelands again. In the Alice Springs region where the now celebrated filmmaker first became known for his first feature, Samson and Delilah, an ineffable masterpiece, back in 2009.

Wolfram belongs to the interesting genre we have come to know as the outback western. The genre includes some of my favourite local films, like The Tracker, The Proposition, and Mystery Road and High Ground. While the numbers of films in this space are growing slowly, it is surely a genre in which plenty more can be said.

The wellspring of the Wolfram story belongs within the family histories of director Thornton and writer David Tranter, who collaborated on the screenplay with Steven McGregor. Members of the Thornton and Tranter families were forced to work in the wolfram (tungsten) mines that were opened on their ancestral lands early last century and reworked in the 1930s, when this film is set.

Child labour in those mines is a part of Indigenous family history in the central desert areas where the mineral is abundant.........

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