Ivan Sen

Ivan Sen
Born	Australia
Occupation	Filmmaker

Ivan Sen is an Australian indigenous filmmaker.

His mother was Aboriginal and father, Croatian. He was raised in Inverell, New South Wales, Australia, growing up in Tamworth and Inverell.

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.

Sen's first feature-length work, Beneath Clouds, filmed 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. For the screenplay, he drew on his own background as the child of an Aboriginal mother and an absent white father. The film follows two teenagers, Lena (Dannielle Hall) and Vaughn (Damian Pitt) who are hitchhiking their way from a rural New South Wales town to Sydney, each for different reasons. The film explores many of the racial difficulties in their society as well as the way the choices each makes can affect how they turn out.

In 2005, Sen's documentary Yellow Fella, screened in Official Selection 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's second feature-length film, Dreamland, screened at the 2010 Busan International Film Festival and Melbourne International Film Festival.

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