Ivan Sen (born 1972) is an Indigenous Australian filmmaker. He is a director, screenwriter and cinematographer, as well as an editor, composer and sound designer. He is co-founder and director of Bunya Productions. Early life Ivan Sen was born in 1972 in Nambour, Queensland, the second child of Donella and Duro Sen. His mother Donella belongs to the Gamilaroi nation of Northern New South Wales, and Duro was born in Croatia to a German father and Hungarian mother. Before moving to Tamworth, New South Wales four years after Sen was born, in his mother's efforts to escape domestic violence, the family would regularly visit her birthplace, Toomelah. The Aboriginal community there was the last destination of three forced relocations of the Gamilaroi. Founded in 1937 by the New South Wales government, Toomelah turned from reserve into mission, but is also called a station, and has a history of precarious conditions and harming policies. Sen's mother herself was taken away at the age of fourteen to serve as cheap, forced labour at a remote farm. For eight years Sen lived in Tamworth with his mother and two siblings, in an area called Vegemite Village. The family still visited Toomelah occasionally, and Sen enjoyed popularity and friendship with all kinds of children, both black and white, rich and poor. However, wanting to overcome the difficult reality of the neighbourhood, his mother moved the family to Inverell. There, Sen was intimidated by the conservative, more racially and socially segregated dynamic of the town. Sen remained a solitary and silent teenager. The change put Sen into contact with painting and photography. His mother married a newspaper editor, who gave him an old Olympus and lessons on photography and film-processing. Soon Sen was working for a newspaper and later enrolled in a photography diploma course at Griffith University, Brisbane. He moved on to film school at the same university and, one year later, to the Australian Film, Television and Radio School in Sydney. There he developed views which were contrary to the classical model of filmmaking taught at the school. Career Sen went on to produce numerous short films throughout the late 1990s, including TV documentaries for SBS and the ABC. During the 2000s he produced many documentaries, mostly for ABC Television. He worked with producer David Jowsey, who commissioned his first feature film, Beneath Clouds (released in 2002). This semi-autobiographical film was made with