Growing up, Ivan Sen was fascinated by cops. Living with his Gomeroi mum and siblings in a housing commission area of Tamworth known (affectionately, he says) as "Vegemite Village", his life was entwined with the justice system.
Content warning: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that this article contains content that may be distressing, and the name of a person who has died.
In year 9, when it came time for work experience, he chose the local police station — the first student in his school to do so. He read through old case files, learned about gathering evidence and how to charge people, and ogled the SWAT team equipment.
"I absolutely loved it," he recalls.
When the US reality series COPS and the true crime show 48 Hours landed on Australian screens, they fuelled his interest in police and detective work — and after high school, he applied to be part of the federal police.
He failed the exam. "So I came up with my own cop called Jay Swan, and the Mystery Road [story]," he quipped at a recent screening of his latest film, Limbo.
Mystery Road, the 2013 film for which he is best known, had a more tragic root, too.
Its story of a dead Indigenous girl, and the hunt for her killer, was inspired by Sen's aunt Theresa Binge, who was found beaten to death under a roadway in Boggabilla, near the NSW-Queensland border, in 2003. She was found by family members, not police.
"[The police] not only were slow to move, but they also didn't move at all for quite a few months," Sen said.
Sen had tried for years to make a film inspired by the incident, before deciding to frame it as a genre film — a contemporary mix of western and noir — and landing on the compelling title Mystery Road.
The film hit a sweet spot, connecting a director who was at the time best known for arthouse films (Beneath Clouds, 2002; Toomelah, 2011) with a mainstream audience. It generated a sequel (2016's Goldstone) and a top-rated, award-winning ABC TV adaptation, now in its third season. At the heart of all these is the character of Jay Swan: an Indigenous detective caught between worlds — the white justice system and the Indigenous experience of it.
In Limbo, which opens nationally this week, Sen returns to the same terrain: a crime mystery about a murdered Indigenous girl in an outback town. But this time, the protagonist is a white detective.
The film follows jaded cop Travis Hurley (Simon Baker) as he arrives in the South Australian opal-mining town of Coober Pedy, tasked with reviewing a 20-year-old cold case: the murder of teenager Charlotte Hayes.
For the family — sister Emma (Natasha Wanganeen) and brother Charlie (Rob Collins) — and the local Indigenous community, the crime and resulting trauma feel fresh; for the town's white inhabitants, however, it seems like ancient history (the fact that two of the key suspects, both white, experience dementia is a pointed detail).
Introducing the film at a Sydney screening, Sen described the film as "the latest instalment, or expression, of … everything I've known about my family and how it's been treated by law enforcement and the judicial system over the years".
"This story is a story that affected my family and also a lot of other Indigenous families around Australia."
Moving the crosshairs
There's a scene in Limbo where Travis opens up the cardboard evidence box for the cold case and finds only an old tape recorder — nothing else.
"A lot of people I know, as well as my own family, have had this type of experience, of murdered women and police not taking any interest in it — or not enough interest in solving the case early on; all of the chances of gathering evidence, and all that crucial time after the crime, being lost, and evidence going missing," Sen tells ABC Arts.
The situation is urgent, with murder rates for First Nations women approximately eight times higher than for their non-Indigenous counterparts, according to Australian Lawyers for Human Rights in its submission to the 2022 Senate inquiry into missing and murdered First Nations women and children.
But Sen describes ongoing apathy at a national level: "It [the inquiry] didn't get any press interest. There were like a couple of articles written about it, but no-one even wants to report about it."
In Limbo, Travis — an "apathetic cop", in Sen's words, still grappling with the physical and psychological impact of working undercover in drug rings — is on a faltering journey towards taking more responsibility for his part in the justice system.
"He's quite different to Jay Swan in that respect; he's probably a bit more damaged, too," says Sen.
"And that political divide is [external] — whereas with Jay Swan, his political divide was within him. So this film kind of refocuses the crosshairs onto this white and black relationship, between the justice system and the Indigenous experience of it."
Going his own way
Mystery Road provided a prominent platform for Sen's perspective, effectively putting a megaphone in his hand. Stars Hugo Weaving, David Wenham and Ryan Kwanten (True Blood) signed up for the films, and local heavyweights including Judy Davis and Colin Friels star in the TV adaptation — which covered similar topical terrain, though Sen says he had little to do with the series, beyond a nominal role as one of its executive producers.
It also affirmed his knack for marrying genre format with political content — a kind of "Trojan Horse" approach to delivering "the experience of Aboriginal culture and perspective", as he describes it in Limbo's press notes.
The high-profile actors he worked with on Mystery Road have followed him on to other projects — including Weaving and Kwanten, who starred in Sen's 2022 arthouse film Loveland, a sci-fi romance set in future Hong Kong.
Far from "levelling up" to blockbusters, Sen seems destined to continue making smaller, arthouse films (albeit ambitious ones, with big themes and topics).
Part of this is about creative control: Sen prefers small budgets, which come with little to no strings attached. He also has an idiosyncratic way of working, taking on many of the creative roles himself, including cinematography, editing and composing. For Loveland, he even taught himself special effects.
"I find it hard to get the passion going unless I've kind of got my fingers on the paintbrush and dipping it into all the different colours, and then putting it on the canvas," Sen told RN Drive in 2022.
"That's how I see filmmaking as a process. I see it as creating, painting … And I'm always just trying to take away those boundaries that have been put up over the years in the filmmaking world, and try to get filmmaking into the realm of painting, or a more pure art form."
For Limbo, Sen's creative input extended into sourcing the idiosyncratic locations around Coober Pedy (which include an underground hotel) and the props (most notably, the striking Dodge Phoenix that Travis drives).
"Loveland made me understand that the whole filmmaking process is just about design," Sen says.
"[It's] designing the story, designing the characters, and the design of the imagery and the location, the lighting, and the sound … and making it all work together."
At this point in his career, he says, potential investors know how he works, and can take it or leave it: "If the investors [aren't prepared] to make a film how I want to make it — by doing a range of roles — then I probably just don't do it," he told RN Drive.
Sen would like to see the film industry change in other ways, too.
"The whole structure of financing and how film is created — it's a very white process, compared to the way Indigenous people think and act," he says.
"It's more distant from us, as a people, than using cameras and having people talk and tell stories, which we've been doing for a long time.
"And the fact that most of [the money] comes from government as well, where every cent is supposed to be accounted for — this can be counterproductive to getting Indigenous stories out there. So maybe we need to look at the process of how films are made and whether we need to take it away from government and have more private financing involved with the whole process, and more freedom."
Limbo is in cinemas now.
