Cate Blanchett stars in and helps produce Warwick Thornton's 'The New Boy', filmed in South Australia regions

Cate Blanchett was a producer as well as starring in Warwick Thornton's film The New Boy, filmed around regional South Australia. Blanchett is pictured in her role as a nun with newcomer Aswan Reid.

Oscar winner Cate Blanchett's South Australia-made film, The New Boy, was selected for the 2023 Cannes film festival in its un certain regard programme, an honour given in 2022 to The Stranger – also made in South Australia, starring Joel Edgerton.

Filmed in regional South Australia and supported by the South Australian Film Corporation, The New Boy was written and directed by Indigenous filmmaker Warwick Thornton, who won a golden camera award for best first feature at the 2009 Cannes festival for Samson & Delilah. Alongside Samson & Delilah, Thornton was best known for Sweet Country that won him the special jury prize at the Venice Film Festival and the platform prize at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2017. Both films won the award for best film from the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts.

Blanchett starred in and co produced The New Boy.  She played a renegade nun in a remote outback monastery, where a nine-year-old Aboriginal orphan played by newcomer Aswan Reid, arrives in the middle of the night during World War II. His presence disturbs the delicately balanced world in this story of spiritual struggle and the cost of survival. Newcomer Reid was cast in the titular role, alongside Blanchett, Deborah Mailman and Wayne Blair, with an ensemble of new faces, including Shane Brady, Tyrique Brady, Laiken Woolmington, Kailem Miller, Kyle Miller, Tyzailin Roderick and Tyler Spencer, rounding out the cast.

The New Boy had production funding from Screen Australia’s first nations department that focused on the lives of Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.