Director

Roderick Mackay

Australia | 2020 | 116 min | English, Badimaya, Pashto, Punjabi, Cantonese

• Producer Timothy White, Tenille Kennedy
• Production Company Southern Light Films, The Koop
• Screenplay Roderick MacKay
• Cinematography Michael McDermott
• Editing Merlin Eden
• Sound David Raines, Nick Gallagher
• Cast Ahmed Malek, David Wenham, Baykali Ganambarr, Jay Ryan, Erik Thomson, Trevor Jamieson, Samson Coulter, Wakara Gondarra, Mahesh Jadu, Osamah Sami, Goran D Kleut
• Contacts

  Arclight Film

  Lina@arclightfilms.com

About the Film

Debut feature writer-director Roderick MacKay’s The Furnace is a new turn-of-thecentury frontier mythology that weaves peoples of different cultural and religious backgrounds into the historic tapestry of Australia’s outback.

1897, Western Australia. To escape a harsh existence and return home, a young Afghan cameleer (Ahmed Malek) partners with a mysterious bushman on the run (David Wenham) with two 400-oz Crown-marked gold bars. Together, the unlikely pair must outwit the hotheaded and zealous police sergeant Shaw (Jay Ryan) and his troopers known as the Gold Squad, in a race to reach a secret furnace—the one place where they can safely reset the bars to remove the mark of the Crown.

The Furnace is an unlikely hero’s tale, navigating greed and the search for identity in a new land. The film illuminates the forgotten history of Australia’s camel herders collectively known as ‘Ghan,' predominantly Muslim and Sikh men from India, Afghanistan, and Persia, who opened up the nation’s desert interior by transporting freight across the inhospitable landscape, linking colonies to settlements that sprung up during the gold rush. They drew on aboriginal knowledge of the land to navigate desert routes, forming unique bonds with local Aboriginal people.

Cinematographer Michael McDermott, with his graceful camerawork, clearly used classic Westerns as his visual references, while Mark Bradshaw’s ominous score feeds into this beautiful, disquieting landscape. Eric Kohn said on IndieWire: “The plight of men like Hanif has been lost to the history books, and this sensitive portrait rescues it with a rich, emotionally resonant lead performance that complicates the history of the Muslim diaspora and Australia’s dark past at once. The reckoning continues.” The Furnace, worthy of the cinematic traditions that inspired it, made its debut at this year’s Venice Horizons.

Nicole Guillemet