Daniel is a ten-year-old boy living in Toomelah, NSW. After being suspended from school for threatening to stab a classmate with a pencil and finding there is little to do in his town, he decides he wants to be a part of the gang controlling the drug trade in his township, so he decides to help Linden, a well-known local drug dealer. Bruce, one of Linden's rivals, is released from prison and a turf war erupts. Meanwhile, Daniel faces problems at school and in his family, such as his mother's addictions, the estrangement of his alcoholic father and the return of his aunt who was forcibly removed from the mission as a child during the Stolen Generations.[3][4][5]
When asked why he made a film about Toomelah, director Ivan Sen said:
I’ve always wanted to make a film out there because some of my earliest memories come from there. I’ve never lived there, but I used to go there all the time… But my mother grew up there and all her family come from there so there’s always been a connection there. As a result, I’ve always wanted to go back there and do something, make this film, a drama. It took a long time work out a method in which to do it, but the story came from a very intense observation period where I went out there for a few weeks and just followed a few teenage boys around and followed the little boy around who played Daniel and wrote down everything I saw, even the dialogue I heard. All of that all came together in the screenplay.
Before filming, Sen obtained permission to film in Toomelah from the town's elders. Sen shot most of the scenes himself, as many of the actors in the movie are his personal friends and he believed their acting would be restricted if an entire conventional crew did the filming.[3]
