While researching the Australian gold rush of the 1800s, director Roderick MacKay came across an image that immediately jumped out at him: men dressed in turbans and flanked by camels stood next to the bushmen of nascent modern-day Australia. “I stumbled upon images of these guys in traditional garb with the camel trains in the otherwise familiar Australian outback and was just like, ‘What the hell is this?’” says the director.

What he’d found was a part of Australia’s history that was largely unknown until recently: the story of the men drawn from all over the British empire – known as “cameleers” – who helped build links between early Australian colonial settlements.

Six years after finding the photograph, The Furnace – MacKay’s fictional account of the cameleers and the hostile Australia that welcomed them – has had its debut in the Venice film festival’s Orizzonti sidebar, bringing with it a dose of gritty outback drama to the Covid-19 affected but still glamorous Lido.

Set in the late 1890s, when the British empire stretched across the world, MacKay’s film focuses on a young Afghan cameleer (Ahmed Malek) and a gold thief, played by David Wenham (beloved locally for his role in comedy-drama SeaChange, but better known to the rest of the world for his turn in The Lord of the Rings). Part western (there’s one particularly noticeable nod to Sergio Leone) and part road movie, the film has an aesthetic similarity to both There Will Be Blood and John Hillcoat’s The Proposition, as the cameleers are met by the brutal environment of the outback and the callousness of its new inhabitants.

The cameleers are treated terribly in the film, and MacKay says atrocities were not unheard of, with witness accounts of summary executions by white Australians. The cameleers, who were largely Persian, Afghan, Turkish, Egyptian and Indian, were given the racist catch-all moniker “Ghans”, and used camels to transport goods across the country. “The men played a really important role in the formation of the country,” says MacKay. “They laid the foundations for the railroads and the telegraph lines and assisted with the opening up of the interior.”

Filming took place on the country of the Yamatji Badimia people, a remote part of Western Australia where temperatures rose to 50°C and swarms of flies made shooting arduous – at times, the insects can be seen visibly sucking moisture from the actors’ eyes during takes. The locations were so remote that the production team had to grade the roads so they could transport equipment.

MacKay’s own journey to Venice was probably the most convoluted of any of the directors who travelled to the Lido. From his home in Perth, Australia, MacKay travelled first to Qatar before moving on to Rome where, to comply with Italy’s lockdown restrictions, he holed up in an Airbnb for a fortnight before taking a train to Venice.

He made the journey with the hope the film can act as a starting point for people wanting to know more about modern Australia’s history – that it might help to create “a more inclusive sense of Australian identity” and spread the cameleers’ story.

“I was pretty astonished to have never heard about this before. I’ve not been taught it in high school or university and it felt like a huge historic omission that needed to be corrected,” he says.

MacKay says there is “a new willingness in Australia to peel back into the past” and come to terms with it, warts and all, to understand a bit better how the country has arrived at the present. In the film, that history lesson can be stark. Wenham’s character is said to have taken part in the real-life Kalkadoon massacre of 1884, in which hundreds of Indigenous Australians were killed by police and colonists.

“It’s kind of the equivalent of the Wounded Knee Creek massacre,” says MacKay. “That is a very mythic event in American westerns and frontier mythologies. But we have massacres on the same scale in Australia, but they’re still not widely known.”

Setting the record straight also meant including Indigenous Australians in the narrative. The Aboriginal characters feature heavily and, as they did in real life, embrace cameleers and in some instances invite them to live within their communities. “It makes a lot of sense,” says MacKay. “A lot of the cameleers came from tribal-based cultures, deeply spiritual, nomadic people and obviously, a lot of these traits are shared by Aboriginal people. And then they both received a great deal of prejudice from the colonial Anglo-Celtic community. So that laid the foundation for this bond.”

The Indigenous characters speak in the Badimaya dialect, an endangered language because so few people can speak it. One elder who was considered an authority on it died a year before shooting. That meant MacKay had to consult vastly across the community to try and understand the language well enough to use it in the film. “That was pretty daunting having to undertake that,” he says. “But it also made it so much more meaningful.”

In the film the cameleers are caught between wanting to return home and knowing the gold rush could bring them vast wealth. For some of the men, MacKay found, that conflict saw them stuck in their adopted country. “A lot of these guys did actually become trapped in Australia because there was a financial barrier in getting back to their homelands,” he says. “There are stories of someone walking into the oldest mosque in South Australia and there are these ancient men there who were the last of that final generation of cameleers.”

The legacy of the cameleers can still be found in Australia, says MacKay, in the stories told by their descendants.