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key indigenous australian issues
| home | news lGreat black hopeby Mark Naglazas June 2002 - Ivan Sen has been hailed as the Great Black Hope of Australian cinema - the indigenous director most likely to follow in the footsteps of Peter Weir, Fred Schepisi and Baz Luhrmann. The shorts he made during his time at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School are widely regarded as the best body of student work since that of Jane Campion. More significantly, Sen's debut feature Beneath Clouds, about two teens in search of identity and belonging, collected three awards and a standing ovation at the Berlin Film Festival in February. Yet Sen is not comfortable with being described as an indigenous filmmaker. "Films told from a black perspective are quite new so it's understandable that journalists are looking to put a label on the phenomenon,' explains Sen. "But I'm not interested in using cinema to talk about social issues. For an artist it is far too restricting. My passion is for characters and stories - and if they happen to be about Aboriginal issues so be it. If not, I'm not going to worry about it.' In fact, Sen regards the openly autobiographical Beneath Clouds as both a culmination and a conclusion to his long-held concern with his mixed heritage and notions of cultural identity. "It's out of my system now so I can move on,' he says with an obvious sense of relief. Beneath Clouds is about two teenagers who meet up on the road to Sydney. One is a volatile Aboriginal who has absconded from a youth detention centre in order to visit his dying mother; the other is a schoolgirl of Aboriginal descent seeking her long-absent Irish father. At first Vaughn (Damian Pitt) and Lena (Dannielle Hall) struggle to find any common ground. However, during the course of the journey Vaughn and Lena begin to realise they share a common purpose. Sen says that his story is Lena's. "My mother is identifiably Aboriginal and my father, who was an abusive alcoholic, is Hungarian-German,' Sen says. "I grew up in the indigenous community in Inverell (a small town in northern New South Wales) but I never felt any sense of belonging because I was a lot fairer than any of my cousins.' When Sen finally got out of Inverell it was not to seek out his absent father but to study photography at Griffith University in Brisbane. "I've always been attracted to photography because I've always seen myself as an outsider looking in - not part of any particular world but observing from a distance.' It was early in his university career that Sen discovered movies. "I was doing my first slide show and I discovered the magic of putting pictures with sound,' he says. "It felt like the medium found me.'
After enrolling in a series of short film courses and a period working in a Brisbane production house, Sen entered the AFTRS in 1995. There he was able to put together a body of work so impressive that it allowed him to make an astonishingly smooth transition to feature films. One of the reasons Sen's career has progressed so rapidly is his passion about all aspects of his craft, from the scripting (he does all of his own writing) and casting (Pitt and Hall are impressive first-timers), through to cinematography (he has a wonderful eye) and sound (he does all his own composing). Not surprisingly, Sen's filmmaking hero is Hollywood perfectionist Michael Mann (Heat, The Insider, Ali). "His work is so controlled,' says Sen. "There is not a single detail in his films he hasn't had a hand in. And I love the atmosphere that he is able to create through his use of (the) visual and music." Curiously, Sen's other cinematic hero is Lars von Trier, whose unadorned, seemingly improvised approach in films such as Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark is supposed to be a slap in the face to the kind of polished, big-budget filmmaking epitomised by Mann. "I'm looking for a marriage between Michael Mann and Lars von Trier,' says Sen. "If I can achieve that I think I'll have something very special – a sense of spontaneity that disguises a huge contrivance.' To reaffirm the depth and breadth of Sen's artistic vision, his next film is an American-set, sci-fi Thriller-cum-black-comedy about an FBI agent who finds herself in the famed UFO town Roswell. The twist in Sen's film is that Roswell is the place where people come to be abducted by aliens. "It might sound a bit Hollywood but it's actually a continuation of my Beneath Clouds theme - the search for love ,' he says. Source: The West Australian related links:
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