Cate Blanchett’s Dirty Films is lining up an October shoot in Australia on The New Boy in which the Oscar winner will play a renegade nun who shelters a young Aboriginal boy. The Veterans, currently engaging with EFM buyers on Naomi Watts drama The Friend, handles international rights and will launch sales later this year.
Deborah Mailman and Wayne Blair will also star in the production, which will shoot in South Australia. Indigenous Australian filmmaker Warwick Thornton, who directed Venice 2017 special jury prize winner and TIFF platform Prize winner Sweet Country, will direct from his own screenplay.
The story takes place in the 1940s as a nine-year-old Aboriginal orphan arrives in the dead of night at a remote monastery run by a renegade nun. His presence disturbs the delicately balanced world in a story of spiritual struggle and the cost of survival.
Blanchett, who won Academy Awards for Blue Jasmine and The Aviator and is among the cast of Netflix’s best picture Oscar nominee Don’t Look Up, produces with Andrew Upton and Georgie Pym for Dirty Films alongside Kath Shelper for Scarlett Pictures.
The New Boy is a Dirty Films and Scarlett Pictures co-production. Roadshow Films will distribute for Australia and New Zealand, and CAA Media Finance and UTA Independent Film Group handle sales for North America.
The project was developed by Scarlett Pictures with the assistance of Screen Australia’s First Nations Department and is scheduled to wrap production at the end of 2022.
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