When it is not being whitewashed and romanticized, the history of colonization is usually told as that of an extremely violent enterprise, filled with murder, forced assimilation, and disease. While accurate, there is also another history that isn't necessarily told as often as this bloody one. There is a violence inherent to the colonization process, a violence that isn't as obvious, but must be acknowledged nonetheless. It is a violence that Australian director Warwick Thornton tries - and mostly succeeds - to depict in his newest movie, The New Boy. Thornton, a member of the Kaytej people, sets off to tell a story of the destruction of Aboriginal culture done not through sheer force, but through kindness - and that, perhaps, makes everything all the more unsettling.
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