Ivan Sen is in a race against time. Sadly, so are our waterways

Ivan Sen reckons he is running out of time. The acclaimed Kamilaroi director of such films as Beneath Clouds (2002), Mystery Road (2013), Goldstone (2016), Loveland (2022) and Limbo (2023) is impatient to step up the pace of his filmmaking.

He is already prolific but, turning 55 soon, Sen wants to finish The Servant, a horror film starring Sigrid Thornton that he shot this year, and get back to This Winter, revisiting the characters he started filming for a drama a decade ago.

“I need to keep moving,” he says. “I’m opening my own horror studio. I’ve got one to do for the next three or four years at least.”

So when Sen was approached to shoot a series of short films for one of the centrepiece exhibitions at the opening of Powerhouse Parramatta, the new museum in western Sydney that has become the centre of controversy, he had no interest.

“I said no, of course,” he says. “I was just not interested because I was focusing on narrative [films]. The last non-narrative thing I did was [a 2009 documentary] on Charlie Perkins.”

The Powerhouse had commissioned seven Indigenous communities around NSW to create projects about caring for their water country for an undisclosed sum. Many focus on sharing cultural knowledge about the stewardship of waterways and passing it on to younger generations.

The museum’s executives wanted Sen to shoot short films with each of these communities for the exhibition Overflow. What convinced him to get involved was the simplicity of the idea. He also realised there was a personal benefit.

“I just wanted to get back out on country and spend time with mob,” he says. “You get wrapped up in your own world and you don’t really know what’s going on unless you get out into places and talk to people. And as a filmmaker, that’s everything. Otherwise, you’re just at home making stuff up.”

A month before the exhibition opens, the museum is still a construction site that requires visitors to don high-vis vests, hardhats, boots and eye protection. Once that’s done, it’s time to head through a maze and up three floors to an auditorium where Sen is casting an eye over a large LCD screen playing stunning images he has shot over the past year.

There are whales surging through the ocean, a stingray sliding across a sea bed, the historic Brewarrina Fish Traps, a sunset over still water, dozens of resting pelicans, the pristine calmness of the bush in early morning, the lighting of an Aboriginal cultural fire to clear undergrowth, and thousands of tiny crabs scurrying across the sand.

Now and then there are signs of environmental damage that Indigenous communities are working to improve … clusters of native sea urchins that are degrading the rocky reef around Narooma on the south coast, plastic bottles washed up along a riverbank, a sign saying “no swimming”.

“I got to go to places I’ve never been before,” Sen says.

In front of the screen is an ingenious shallow lake – tidal despite being three floors up – that visitors can paddle in when Overflow opens. Benches lying to the side during construction will be installed so visitors can take in an experience about Indigenous care for the state’s salt and freshwater ecosystems.

One of those projects is right outside the Powerhouse. Members of Baramadagal community from Dharug country are monitoring the ecology and helping clean up the Parramatta River.

Across the city, the Gamay Rangers from Dharawal country at La Perouse are conducting the first dedicated study of marine mammals in Botany Bay and surrounding coastal waters to support their conservation work.

At Lightning Ridge in the state’s north, Goondee Aboriginal Keeping Place & Museum/Woganurra Aboriginal Corporation have created a new space to share Yuwaalaraay cultural knowledge of sky, water, country and creation.

Not far away at Brewarrina, Moogahlin Performing Arts from Ngemba country is exploring the relationship between river health and community wellbeing in an arts project called Big Rivers, No Fish Feast.

Also involved in water care projects are the Jagun Alliance from Bundjalung country (Lismore in the Northern Rivers), Joonga Land and Water Aboriginal Corporation from Yuin country (Narooma) and Naru Indigenous Corporation from Gumbaynggirr country (Coffs Harbour).

The Powerhouse – a billion-dollar project that has been attracting negative headlines throughout its construction – will open on November 7. Acting chief executive Abbie Galvin and senior adviser Louise Herron have been working to deliver it since chief executive Lisa Havilah was stood aside in August pending an investigation into “governance and procurement practices”. Undisclosed misconduct allegations involving Powerhouse executives have also been referred to the Independent Commission Against Corruption.

The son of an Aboriginal mother and Croatian father, the quietly spoken Sen grew up in the NSW country towns of Tamworth and Inverell then, after studying at TAFE, trained at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School. He lives at Tamborine Mountain, inland from the Gold Coast, with his wife, Chen Xi, and sons aged 12 and 14.

Sen’s famously intense devotion to filmmaking has made him almost a one-man crew on many of his films. He is often writer, director, producer, casting agent, cinematographer, sound recordist, stills photographer, editor, composer, sound designer, distributor and – since teaching himself by watching YouTube videos – visual effects artist.

His challenge on Overflow was “finding the cinema in locations I didn’t choose”. He decided to focus on faces, stunning landscapes and magical wildlife moments, captured at times by drone and underwater camera.

“Out west the rivers are just a mess,” he says. “We don’t really hear about it much. The problem is there’s not many fish left. They’re all European carp that have muddied the waters and are eating a lot of the young native fish.”

He aimed to make the images cinematic and emotional.

“When you come from drama, you learn about the power of character within the space that a character is in,” he says. “I pulled that kind of feature filmmaking experience into this installation in a way that’s probably different to other installations. I’m always trying to connect with the people and the land at the same time.”

Sen hopes the exhibition will make audiences more aware of the importance of waterways.

“People don’t really pay it much attention until something bad happens – really bad – but the main thing is the poor condition of a lot of our waterways and how little we talk about it,” he says. “One of the ladies at Brewarrina was talking about how a festival out there is about giving the river a voice. These short films are giving a voice to our waterways.”

Once Overflow opens, Sen will finish editing The Servant. Set in the 1970s, it was inspired by his mother and a young cousin being sent from the Toomelah Aboriginal mission in northern NSW to work at two rural households in South Australia.

Then he will revisit This Winter, which is about an Indigenous mother (Ursula Yovich) dealing with a son (Sen’s cousin, Brandon Waters) arriving back from jail after losing another son to suicide.

“The plan is to go back and finish the second half of the film, where he’s older,” he says. “[His] life has been an amazing rollercoaster, most of it in jail. He looks very different to how he was.”

Then he plans to start rolling out horror films.

So why horror?

“Horror really suits me as a filmmaker,” he says. You can make them with low budgets but you can go for a very large audience.

“For a lot of our people, it’s been a horror story for many years. Horror for me is the perfect way to get those stories to younger people.”

More immediately, Overflow is one of four opening exhibitions at the museum that are free to visitors, joining Es Devlin: The Turning (major works by British artist and stage designer Es Devlin), The Dark (which reframes the fear of darkness for children aged four to 12 into a “playground of curiosity”) and The Mall (on the history and global impact of shopping centres, especially in western Sydney).

The fifth exhibition, Task Eternal (which traces the history of aviation and space exploration), is ticketed for adults but free for children.

Overflow opens at Powerhouse Parramatta on November 7.

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