As film titles go, Emu Plains is as good as any. Or it would have been, had it not been for the internet.

Emu Plains was the working title for the new film being made by Englishman Jim Loach – director of Oranges and Sunshine and son of legendary firebrand director Ken Loach – in South Australia. But type those seemingly innocuous words into any search engine and what you get is a scandalous scroll of stories about teachers accused of sexual abuse and female inmates escaping from prison.

Not exactly the stuff of a light-hearted family melodrama.

“Emu Plains isn't looking so good any more,” admits one of the film's English producers on the Adelaide set. “So for now we're stuck with 'Untitled Jim Loach Project'.”

Not super-catchy, perhaps, but what the film lacks in name it more than makes up for in cast.

Edward James Olmos (Miami Vice), Carmen Maura (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown), Paz Vega (Spanglish) – these are some of the biggest names in Spanish and Spanish-language cinema. So how did they come to be here, making a family drama set in the Barossa Valley?

Loach admits it's a bit of a mystery even to him. “When we first talked about the film, I sat down with the producers and said, 'So, just to get this straight, the basic idea is to take a bunch of Spanish actors, take them to Australia, put them in the desert and make a film with an English bloke?' "And they were like, 'Yeah, we're up for that'.”

Oranges and Sunshine – a based-on-fact drama about the forced emigration of supposedly orphaned English kids to Australia in the 1950s and '60s – was a surprise hit that put Loach, who had until then been working in British TV, on the map. But it was a draining experience and his as-yet-untitled project is in altogether lighter territory. But not too light.

It's a tale of a family of Spanish immigrants living in a rambling farmhouse on the cusp of wine country and desert. They are haunted by a dark secret in the father's past, and the story is told through the eyes of his and his wife's (Vega) 12-year-old son (Sydney's Michael Crisafulli).

“This is a Spanish family but it could easily have been an Australian family, an English family, an American family,” Loach says. “Thematically, you're dealing with things that are universal, and that's why I wanted to make it.”

It wasn't intentional, the producers say, but having a Spanish cast brings something that few Australian-made films can offer – access to the enormous Spanish-speaking audience around the world.

“When you start pitching the project to international sales agents you very quickly realise that's one of the strengths, one of the points of difference,” says Tim White, the New Zealand-born producer of Two Hands and Mr Pip.

“There are well over 40 million people who speak Spanish just in the US. Edward James Olmos is a real tangible marketing element, and many of the other actors have great profile, especially Paz Vega and Carmen Maura. I would hope a film like this has some commercial appeal to markets we don't usually have access to.”

Here's to that. Now all they need is a name.