AustLit

Screenwriter, director, cinematographer.

An Indigenous Australian filmmaker who grew up in the New South Wales country towns of Tamworth and Inverell, Ivan Sen is a descendant of the Gamilaroi and Bigambal language groups of northwest New South Wales and southern Queensland. He also is of Hungarian, German and Croatian descent. In the early 1990s he studied photography at the Queensland College of Art and worked as a camera operator and sound recordist. He also graduated from the Australian Film, Television and Radio School in 1997 with a BA in directing.

Throughout the late 1990s Sen worked on numerous short films, before making his feature film debut Beneath Clouds in 2002. For this project he drew on his own background as the child of an Aboriginal mother and an absent white father. Both written and directed by Sen, Beneath Clouds drew much critical acclaim, and was subsequently nominated for numerous national and international awards. Among these were wins for Best Directing (2002 AFI Awards and 2002 IF Awards).

Since 2002 Sen has worked predominantly on documentaries. In 2005 his film Yellow Fella was chosen to screen at the Official Selection of the Cannes Film Festival, the first Indigenous Australian documentary to do so.