In a remote monastery in 1940s Australia, a mission for Aboriginal children is run by a renegade nun, Sister Eileen (Cate Blanchett). A new charge (Aswan Reid) is delivered in the dead of night – a boy who appears to have special powers. When the monastery takes possession of a precious relic, a large carving of Christ on the cross, the new boy encounters Jesus for the first time and is transfixed. However, the boy’s Indigenous spiritual life does not gel with the mission’s Christianity and his mysterious power becomes a threat. Sister Eileen is faced with a choice between the traditions of her faith and the truth embodied in the boy, in this story of spiritual struggle and the cost of survival.
The spark of life that gave Warwick Thornton what is now “The New Boy” took 18 years to flicker, and then fully glow. The Australian filmmaker looked to his own childhood, raised by monks, to find the spiritual fairy tale that now manifests via the film’s eponymous Aboriginal child in a sweeping and poetic portrait of stifled faith and the threat of monopoly on religion.
Produced by Dirty Films and Scarlett Pictures