EXCLUSIVE: Here’s first footage of Venice Film Festival drama The Furnace, the only Australian feature at this year’s festival.

 Australian writer Roderick MacKay’s debut feature stars Ahmed Malek (Clash), Jay Ryan (It: Chapter 2) and David Wenham (Lion) in a story set in the 1890s gold rush of Western Australia. The feature illuminates the forgotten history of Australia’s ‘Ghan’ cameleers, who were predominantly Muslim and Sikh men from India, Afghanistan, and Persia, who traversed the nation’s vast desert interior, forming bonds with local Aboriginal people.

To escape a harsh existence and return home, one 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.