The New Boy

A deeply personal film from indigenous Australian writer/director Warwick Thornton (Sweet Country, Samson & Delilah), who can also take credit for the film’s stunning cinematography.

In 1940’s Australia, in the middle of World War II, a nine-year-old aboriginal Australian orphan boy (a mesmerizing Aswan Reid) arrives in the dead of night at a remote monastery run by a renegade nun (Cate Blanchett).

As her foundations are rocked, will the secret she has harboured for a year be discovered, imperiling the orphanage? Or will everything be brought in line, made good and safe and orderly, even at the cost of New Boy’s unique Indigenous spiritual power?

“It’s the kind of culturally specific filmmaking that somehow immediately gains universality in that ambition to connect, to understand the empathy and sensitivity to listen in to these conflicts and this bright spark of a boy who speaks to struggles of faith however you were raised.” ~Ella Kemp, IndieWire

“In Warwick Thornton’s thoughtful magical-realist fable The New Boy, spiritual differences aren’t treated with violence, but echo bloody territorial conflict just the same.” ~Guy Lodge, Variety