First sight: Warwick Thornton

Who is he? An Australian Aboriginal director who left school at 13 and spent a few years kicking around on the streets of Alice Springs, getting into scrapes with the police. "A lost kid," he says. I feel an epiphany ­coming on. You bet. "Cinema saved my life," ­Thornton declared at Cannes last year. We'll give him that, since he was picking up the Camera d'Or prize for best first feature at the time. Samson and Delilah, his teenage love story, is now Australia's entry for best foreign language film at the Oscars. It will go on release here in April. Foreign language? I thought you said it was Australian? Yes, but mostly in the Aboriginal Warlpiri language. Set in a poor rural community, Samson (Rowan ­McNamara), a cheeky-faced petrol ­sniffing kid, falls for no-nonsense ­Delilah (Marissa Gibson). Not that you get much talking between these two. The film is more or less silent – Samson says just one word. Bashful teenagers, they communicate by chucking stones at each other at the start. Sounds delightful It is rather. "A hard love," says the ­director. Poor Samson and Delilah have each other, but not much of a place the world – neglected by their community, treated brutally when they leave. It's unsentimental, intimate; Thornton even put his brother Scott through rehab to play a homeless alcoholic. What next? A period drama set in an orphanage run by Benedictine monks, he says. And who knows, maybe an Oscar. If Samson and Delilah makes it to the nominations, Thornton will most likely be up against big beasts Michael Haneke and Jacques Audiard. But the foreign language award is famously unpredictable.