Writer-director Ivan Sen reckons he learned a valuable lesson after he
shot Dreamland, an experimental movie about an obsessive UFO hunter who roams
the Nevada desert and discovers a deeper mystery, in 2009.
He showed a print to a French-based international sales agent who said she loved the
film but admitted, “I can’t sell it.” So when Sen and producer David Jowsey
subsequently set up Bunya Productions, they resolved that every film would have a
defined target audience.
That strategy paid off with the director’s Toomelah and looks like continuing the
wave of successful Indigenous films with Sen’s Mystery Road. Jowsey showed a 10-
minute clip of the murder mystery at a function at the Australian Film Television and
Radio School on Wednesday night to launch the new edition of the school’s quarterly
journal LUMINA.
The issue celebrates the rise of Indigenous filmmaking including interviews with Sen,
director/cinematographer Warwick Thornton and his producer Kath Shelper,
director Tony Krawitz and The Sapphires scriptwriters Tony Briggs and Keith
Thompson.
The Mystery Road clip caused a palpable buzz among the audience, not least for
Sen’s stunning cinematography in and around the outback towns of Moree and
Winton. Aaron Pedersen plays an Aboriginal cop, Detective Jay Swan, who’s called
on to investigate the murder of a young Indigenous girl and realises a serial killer is
at work. The cast includes Hugo Weaving, Ryan Kwanten, Jack Thompson and Tony
Barry.
Jowsey told SBS Film the film is still in post and he hasn’t set a launch date yet. He
envisions a release of 15-30 screens. The $2 million film was financed by Screen
Australia, Screen Queensland and the ABC. Gary Hamilton’s Arclight Films has
world sales rights outside Australia, and an international premiere at the Toronto
International Film Festival in September is on the cards.
In the LUMINA interview, Sen said the film is aimed primarily at art house
audiences while also “pushing hard at the fringes of the multiplexes… It will have
commercial bones but it will also have an Aboriginal and a cultural perspective.”
Sen said Bunya‘s approach is to “target an audience and then create something for
them, with an idea of the budget in mind. It makes everything achievable in a smaller
amount of time.”
The Bunya-produced Satellite Boy, writer-director Catriona McKenzie’s drama about
a 12-year-old Aboriginal lad who sets out for the big city with his best mate after his
grandfather’s house is threatened with demolition, opens in Australia via eOne
Hopscotch on May 16.
The AFTRS has played a pivotal role in nurturing Indigenous screen culture since
CEO Sandra Levy allocated more resources to that sector in 2009, including
appointing Pauline Clague as the institution’s first Indigenous training officer. Since
then more than 600 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders have attended AFTRS
courses.
Also shown at the function was an extended clip of The Gods of Wheat Street, a six-
part ABC-TV drama about the challenges facing a modern Aboriginal family, directed
by Wayne Blair, Catriona McKenzie and Adrian Wills.
DON GROVES / 18 APRIL 2013 / SBSFILM