It’s very rare for an Australian series to have a rapturous reception at a prestigious international film festival, but that’s exactly what happened to Narrow Road to the Deep North.

The five-part drama premiered at Berlinale in February and was immediately showered with a five-star review from the BBC and four stars from The Guardian.

The first trailer has just dropped and it looks lush, dramatic and harrowing.

Adapted by Richard Flanagan’s Booker Prize-winning novel, the series follows the story of Dorrigo Evans, who as a young man engaged in a love affair with his uncle’s wife and was later taken as a WWII prisoner of war during the construction of the Burma railway.

Spanning decades, the show also tracks his later years as a celebrated surgeon as he considers his past.

Jacob Elordi plays Dorrigo as a young man while Irish actor Ciaran Hinds takes over the role as the older version.

The cast also includes Odessa Young, Thomas Weatherall, Show Kasamatsu, Simon Baker, Olivia DeJonge and Heather Mitchell.

Filmed in late-2023 through to 2024 in New South Wales, it was directed by Justin Kurzel from scripts by Shaun Grant. Kurzel and Grant are long-time collaborators dating back to their feature debut, Snowtown. The pair have also worked together on Nitram and True History of the Kelly Gang.

Flanagan and Kurzel are two of Tasmania’s most prominent cultural figures and it’s almost surprising it took the two friends this long to come together on something.

Flanagan has an executive producer credit on the adaptation but he previously told The Guardian he wasn’t interested in an act of “fidelity” to the novel and wanted to let Kurzel make his own version.

Flanagan had been inspired to write the novel by his father’s experiences as a prisoner of war.

He wrote in 2013 at the time of the publication, “My memories of my father when I was a child are of a sick man, debilitated by his war experience. We grew up with a man of often strange anxieties and deep compassion, whose stories of his POW experiences were often very funny while compounded of love and pity.

“But I did not want the book to be about him. As much as his experience and perspective would influence it, I did not want some fictionalised version of his life. As much as it was about my father and me, it had to escape us both.”

It took him 12 years to write the book.

Narrow Road to the Deep North will premiere on Prime Video on April 18