Ivan Sen

Early life and Heritage

Ivan Sen was born in 1972 in Nambour, Queensland, the second child of Donella and Duro Sen. His mother Donella belongs to the Gamilaroi nation of Northern New South Wales, and Duro was born in Croatia to a German father and Hungarian mother.

Before moving to Tamworth four years after Sen was born, his mother’s efforts to escape domestic violence, the family would regularly visit her birthplace, Toomelah. The notorious Aboriginal community was the last destination of three forced re-locations of the Gamilaroi. Founded in 1937 by the New South Wales government, Toomelah turned from reservation into mission, but is also called a station, and has a history of precarious conditions and harming policies. Sen’s mother herself was taken away at the age of fourteen to serve as cheap, forced labor at a remote farm.

For 8 years Sen lived in Tamworth with his mother and two siblings, in an area called Vegemite Village. The family still visited Toomelah occasionally, and Sen enjoyed popularity and friendship with all kinds of children, both black and white, rich and poor. However, wanting to overcome the difficult reality of the neighborhood, his mother moved the family to Inverell. There, Sen was intimidated by the conservative, more racially and socially segregated dynamic of the town. Sen remained a solitary and silent teenager.

The change put Sen into contact with painting and photography. His mother married a newspaper editor, who gave him an old Olympus and lessons on photography skills and how to process film. Soon Sen was working for a newspaper and later enrolled in a photography diploma course at Griffith University, Brisbane. He moved on to film school at the same university, and one year later to film school in Sydney, at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School. There Sen developed an opposition to the classical model of filmmaking taught at the school. Peter Robb wrote that, “in a rare moment of intensity and slightly raised voice, Ivan said this model produced directors who were monsters. He used the word several times.”

He studied filmmaking at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School, where he produced his first short films, working with the crew he continues to work with today.

Throughout the late 1990s Sen worked on numerous short films, before making his feature film debut with Beneath Clouds in 2002.

Career

After making a few TV documentaries for SBS and ABC, Sen made his breakthrough feature-length debut in 2002 with the semi-autobiographical Beneath Clouds. The film was made with a mixed crew, including an Aboriginal director of photography, a white producer and several indigenous secondary crew members. At the time however, Sen and the white producer Teresa-Jane Hanson expressed their discontent with the limited availability of skilled indigenous personnel. The film, produced on a $2.5 million budget won him global acclaim, screening at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival and winning the Premiere First Movie Award at the 2002 Berlin Film Festival and the 2002 Best Director Award at the Australian Film Institute Awards.

The 2000s were marked by a lengthy list of documentaries, mostly made for ABC. In 2005, Sen's documentary Yellow Fella (for SBS), screened in Un Certain Regard at the Cannes International Film Festival. In 2009, the Message Sticks Indigenous Film Festival held at the Sydney Opera House saw the world premiere of Sen's Fire Talker, a documentary biopic about political activist, Aboriginal footballer, and statesman Charlie Perkins. Sen used the revenue of these works for television to finance the production of second feature-length film, Dreamland, which screened at the 2010 Busan International Film Festival and Melbourne International Film Festival.

His third feature Toomelah (2011), received a prolonged standing ovation from the audience as it screened in Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival. The actors were welcomed with celebrity status and Peter Robb described Daniel Connors, the leading 9-year-old non-professional actor as "[handling] the international media like a pro.”

Sen's fourth feature-length film Mystery Road premiered at the Sydney Film Festival in June 2013 and features many well known Australian actors such as Aaron Pedersen, Hugo Weaving, Jack Thompson, Ryan Kwanten and Tasma Walton. The film was shown at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival.

His fifth feature, Goldstone, which is the sequel to Mystery Road, opened the Sydney Film Festival in June 2016 and opened in cinemas on 7 July 2016. It features actors Aaron Pedersen, Jacki Weaver, Alex Russell, David Gulpilil, David Wenham and Tom E. Lewis.

Themes and Films

The documentary Yellow Fella focuses on the Aboriginal actor and musician Tom E. Lewis, who starred in The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (Fred Schepisi, 1978). The character’s “life was hauntedly close to [Lewis’] own: a young man of mixed heritage, struggling to find his place on the edge of two cultures.” Sen documents Lewis as he hits the road to search for his Welsh father’s place of burial and, at the same time, a missing part of his own identity.

Toomelah (2011), tells the story of Daniel, a 9 year-old aboriginal boy living in the community where Sen’s mother was born and grew up in. This hybrid of documentary and fiction follows Daniel as he roams around the “mish” trying to make sense of expectations of his family, his friends, and of he himself. Much of the script was based on notes Sen took of the inhabitants’ own words, expressions, ideas and emotions, trying to translate the immobility from which Toomelah suffers. Both a place that has lost touch with its roots and that was forgotten by the settler state.

Commentators often point to landscape, land and place as one of most crucial set of motifs in Ivan Sen’s films. His distinctive portrayal of skies, roads and low horizons are Sen’s way of addressing issues of location, dislocation and relocation in their relation to identity. According to Jane Mills, “as a descendant of the Gamilaroi people of northern New South Wales who were historically dislocated from their own land and forcibly re-located, Sen’s films are undoubtedly intercultural, diasporic, and postcolonial and as such, qualify as accented and intercultural cinema.”

Feature Drama

Short Drama

Two teenagers walk from the certainty of life on the "mish" to a bus stop and enter uncertain dreams of a life somewhere else. At the bus stop both of them have to make a decision.

Television Documentaries

A film about Aboriginal activist and statesman Charlie Perkins.

The documentary traces the disappearance of Lois Roberts, the family’s uncertainty on her whereabouts, the finding of her body and details about the inquiry and police action.