Daniel Connors used to be known in Toomelah, an Aboriginal settlement on the NSW-Queensland border, as the boy who drowned.

His father, Michael, believes he was unconscious for 45 minutes in the local river before being discovered and resuscitated. Within days, he was back to normal, except that he no longer stuttered.

Now Daniel, a livewire 11-year-old, is best known as the star of Toomelah, a confronting and moving film shot in the former mission by Ivan Sen, an indigenous writer-director whose mother grew up there.

The often comic drama centres on a sensitive boy drawn towards the gangster lifestyle of the local drug dealer. It's a fictional story but like the real life Daniel the film's Daniel has been suspended from school and lives in a community dealing with substance abuse, unemployment and stolen generation grief.

Sen cast Toomelah locals who had never acted, wanting the film to be ''a fly on the wall tour of an indigenous community for the rest of Australia''.