The Adelaide Film Festival (AFF) has launched its 2025 line-up, unveiling 123 films from 27 countries, including 27 world premieres and 37 Australian premieres – one of which is the highly anticipated follow up to Warwick Thornton’s Sweet Country.
The festival will run from 15-26 October across cinemas in Adelaide.
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About Wolfram
Produced by Bunya Productions, Wolfram reunites Thornton with Deborah Mailman in a sequel to his acclaimed western Sweet Country. Set some four years after the events of the first film, Wolfram pulls another thread of David Tranter’s Alyawarra family history, expanding on and deepening the story by taking the perspective of the women and kids of the family.
Directed and shot by Thornton, with a script written by Sweet Country’s writers Steven McGregor and Tranter, Wolfram tells the story of an Indigenous family in the 1930s colonial frontier, lead by their matriarch Pansy, played by Deborah Mailman (The New Boy, Total Control, Boy Swallows Universe).
Thomas M. Wright (Sleeping Dogs, The Stranger, Barkskins) reprises his role as Mick Kennedy, and the now 18-year-old Philomac is played by Pedrea Jackson (Sweet As, Blueback). They’re joined by Errol Shand (The Clearing), Joe Bird (Talk To Me), John Howard (Mad Max : Fury Road), Aidan Du Chiem (Last Days of The Space Age), Ferdinand Hoang (Jasper Jones), Jason Chong (Little Monsters) and Matt Nable (Riddick).
Thornton teased in an earlier press release that Wolfram would mirror the ‘visceral tone and style’ of Sweet Country. It was shot in May of this year on the same locations where the sets for the fictional town of Henry from the original film still stand.
The Adelaide Film Festival program opens with Sophie Hyde’s Jimpa, starring Olivia Colman, John Lithgow and Aud Mason-Hyde, and closes with Thornton’s Wolfram.
Special showings at the Adelaide Film Festival
Other local highlights include The Fox, a darkly comic folktale from Dario Russo. Starring Emily Browning, Jai Courtney and Damon Herriman, the film will make its debut as part of the festival.
AFF’s Special Presentations will showcase several titles direct from major festivals. From Venice comes Guillermo del Toro’s long-awaited Frankenstein featuring Jacob Elordi, Oscar Isaac and Christoph Waltz, alongside Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia with Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons. Rental Family starring Brendan Fraser comes direct from TIFF, while Scott Cooper’s Springsteen biopic Deliver Me From Nowhere with Jeremy Allen White lands in from Telluride.
The Retrospective program pays tribute to film critic David Stratton with a screening of his favourite film, Singin’ in the Rain (1952), and revisits Robert Connolly’s Balibo (2009). Robert Connolly will also receive this year’s Don Dunstan Award for his contribution to Australian screen culture.
The festival competition, first established in 2007, champions emerging filmmakers. Jurors this year include actor Murray Bartlett, director Jub Clerc, and Guadalajara Film Festival’s Pavel Cortés. Five fiction features and five documentaries will compete, with contenders ranging from Thai filmmaker Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s A Useful Ghost to Tamara Kotevska’s The Tale of Silyan.
AFF’s national investment fund supports new titles including Anthony Frith’s Mockbuster (that will screen with his Adelaide-shot B-movie The Land That Time Forgot) and We Are Not Powerless, a documentary from Jolyon Hoff and Muzafar Ali about education initiatives born from refugee experience. Short films Lie Down, Breathe Out and The Knight also premiere under the fund’s banner.
Around the world with Adelaide Film Festival
Mexico will bring a slate of films including Mayra Hermosillo’s Vanilla and J. Xavier Velasco’s Crocodiles, while the World Cinema section features Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon, Zoe Pepper’s Birthright, Rohan Parashuram Kanawad’s Sundance winner Cactus Pears, and Rose Byrne in Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.
Documentary offerings include Raoul Peck’s Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5 and Journey Home, David Gulpilil from Maggie Miles and Trisha Morton-Thomas. Music documentaries span subjects from Jeff Buckley to Jimmy Barnes and Marlon Williams.
Genre remains a focus through the Late Night strand, complemented by Screen Conversations with filmmakers such as Mia’Kate Russell (Penny Lane is Dead) and Finnius Teppett (The Weed Eaters). Additional talks include Sophie Hyde with the cast of Jimpa, and Lynette Wallworth alongside Amazonian shaman Muka Yawanawa.
AFF CEO and creative director Mat Kesting said the festival’s goal remained to ‘curate a program that inspires us, provokes us … and reminds us that we are all part of this vast and diverse community of humans’.
The Adelaide Film Festival runs from 15-26 October 2025.
