Coming from rave reviews at the Venice Film Festival eariler this year THE FURNACE shot right in in WA is getting a cinema release on December 10 via Umbrella Entertainment. Directed by Roderick MacKay and starring David Wenham, Jay Ryan, Erik Thomson, Mahesh Jadu, Trevor Jamieson and Ahmad Malek as Hanif.
1897 Western Australia. To escape a harsh existence and return home, a young Afghan cameleer partners with a mysterious bushman on the run with two 400oz Crown-marked gold bars. Together the unlikely pair must outwit a zealous police sergeant and his troopers 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 ‘Ghan’ cameleers, predominantly Muslim and Sikh men from India, Afghanistan and Persia, who opened up the Nation’s desert interior, thereby forming unique bonds with local Aboriginal people.
