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09-03-2024
SYDNEY: It would take a remarkable acting performance to rival Academy Award winner Cate Blanchett on screen but that’s exactly what untried child prodigy Aswan Reid has done in her latest movie, critics say.
Barely 11 years old when The New Boy was shot in the dusty South Australian outback in 2022, Reid’s audition the very first tape the film’s creators looked at.
“He’s absolutely magnetic. We were so lucky to find him,” Blanchett tells the BBC’s Today program.
“[He’s] a Kiwirrkurra boy from the border of the Northern Territory and Western Australia – who had not only never been off Country, he’d never been on a film set but yet, he learnt more in two days about the film industry than I’d learnt in almost 30 years.”
Variety calls Reid the film’s “secret weapon” while The Guardian wrote that he “delivers Australian cinema’s most impressive child performance for some time”, an assessment rubberstamped last month, when he took home the prize for Best Lead Actor at the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts Awards.
Reid plays the film’s titular character – a nine-year-old Aboriginal orphan with mysterious supernatural powers, whose arrival at a remote monastery in the dead of night sends the place into turmoil.
The fable, which is out in UK cinemas from 15 March, is set in 1940s Australia and touches on one of the nation’s darkest chapters.
From the mid-1800s until 1970, successive generations of Indigenous children estimated to be in the tens of thousands were forcibly removed from their families and cut off from their culture, under policies aimed at assimilation.
The film’s backers say it “explores spirituality, culture and colonization in a way we haven’t seen on screen before”.
For writer and director Warwick Thornton, who is also a giant of the nation’s industry, it’s a deeply personal story.
At the age of 11, the Kaytetye man was sent from his home in Alice Springs to a remote missionary-style school run by Benedictine monks in Western Australia.
Though Thornton is not himself a member of the Stolen Generations, he says the movie is about the “cost of survival”, a theme which would resonate with “any Indigenous person through the last 250 years of colonization”.
“Your lore, your culture and everything has just been completely obliterated to extinction in a strange way,” he said in the film’s press notes.
“You have to adapt in this new world that is like a plague, like a virus that has completely taken over your life and shut down everything that you’ve believed in.” (Int’l News Desk)
