‘It is a ripper’: Adelaide Film Festival adds frontier history and a talking fox in 2025 reveal
Frankenstein, Springsteen, and a sequel to Warwick Thornton’s 2017 western Sweet Country will hit screens around the city, as Adelaide Film Festival drops its full slate of over 120 films for next month.
Eight years after director Warwick Thornton first shared his bracing outback western Sweet Country with Australian audiences at the 2017 Adelaide Film Festival, local filmgoers audiences will be among the first to get a taste of its follow-up in the October festival.
“Warwick is one of our most important filmmakers, and what he does through his feature filmmaking is really a retelling of Australian history,” Adelaide Film Festival CEO and creative director Mat Kesting tells InReview, noting the festival’s support for both Sweet Country and Thornton’s 2009 debut Samson and Delilah, which won the Caméra d’Or at Cannes Film Festival.
Like its predecessor Wolfram draws inspiration from a lesser-known chapter in Australia’s colonial past; while Sweet Country examined the brutal realities of frontier justice in late 1920s Central Australia via the story of an Aboriginal stockman accused of killing of an abusive white pastoralist.
Wolfram explores the historic exploitation of First Nations child labour. Taking over from Sam Neill, Brian Brown and Warlpiri actor Hamilton Morris, the new film is led by Deborah Mailman along with Pedrea Jackson (Robbie Hood) as a grown-up Philomac, last seen as a young boy in the original.
“He’s a really important voice in Australian cinema, and we’re very proud to be able to support him in in the projects that he makes,” Kesting says of Thornton’s ongoing work.
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Wolfram is one of 27 world premieres and 37 Australian premieres across the festival’s full 2025 program, announced on Tuesday.
That includes The Fox, the long-awaited debut feature film from Dario Russo – the local auteur behind the SBS spy parody Danger 5 and that grainy viral classic of early YouTube, Italian Spiderman. Adelaide audiences will get a first look at Russo’s first full-length effort, which appears to mix The Fantastic Mr Fox with Doctor Faustus with the story of a hunter who encounters a talking fox with a proposal.
“It is a ripper,” Kesting says. “It’s been a long time in the making, and produced by the same producers behind Talk To Me, Causeway Films. I think this will be one of the big Australian films that everyone will be talking about for the for years to come, and it’s certainly a jewel in in our crown.”
The Fox includes big names like Jai Courtney, Emily Browning, Damon Herriman and the voices of Sam Neill and Olivia Colman (the latter will also appear in the festival’s previously announced headliner, Sophie Hyde’s Jimpa).
“It’s really great for Adelaide audiences to see such a highly creative, expertly executed film,” Kesting says. “Dario is from Norton Summit, you know, and I just love that we’re making these films in South Australia.”
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The festival’s local slate also includes the documentary Iron Winter, which saw a team of Adelaide-based filmmakers spend months in Mongolia to follow two young horse herders as they attempt a fading rite of passage.
This latest announcement builds on a string of festival highlights that have already been revealed, including the aforementioned family drama Jimpa, David Gulpilil documentary Journey Home, David Gulpilil, and locally shot slasher Penny Lane is Dead.
The 2025 program also includes a healthy dose of buzzy international titles, from Guillermo del Toro’s Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi-starring take on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, to the Bruce Springsteen biopic Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, which casts The Bear star Jeremy Allen White as the Boss during recording of his bleak 1982 classic 1982 Nebraska.
Other highlights include Bugonia, Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest collaboration with Poor Things, The Favourite, and Kinds of Kindness star Emma Stone, and Rental Family, which continues Brendan Fraser’s acting comeback as a struggling American actor in Tokyo.
Other choice cuts include no less than two nostalgic films from American director Richard Linklater (Boyhood, Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise), with Blue Moon – starring Ethan Hawke as Lorenz Hart, the also-ran former collaborator of Richard Rodgers from Rodgers and Hammerstein – and Nouvelle Vague, which riffs on Jean Luc Godard’s French new wave classic Breathless.
In addition to the show tunes for Springsteen, music fans can also tune into new documentaries about Jimmy Barnes, Jeff Buckley and Marlon Williams, while George Miller’s road warrior saga will also score its own tribute via Chris Eley’s Mad Max and the Genius of George Miller.
“One of the things that really distinguishes the Adelaide Film Festival program from our dear friends in Sydney and Melbourne, and even internationally, is the timing of our festival,” Kesting reflects.
“We’re at the head of the award season leading into the Oscars, we come immediately after Venice and Toronto and Telluride film festivals, we also have first dibs on many of the films from Locarno and several other key festivals. What that means is we’re able to secure some of these really big titles that everyone will be talking about in the months to come – and bring them to Adelaide, to be the first people in Australia to see them.
“We’re really proud of being able to secure those films for our audience.”
Adelaide Film Festival runs from October 15 – October 26, view the full program here.