When we spoke with Australian filmmaker Ivan Sen last year, on the back of his film Toomelah, we were very excited to learn that his next project would be a Western set in the Australian outback called Mystery Road. Now he has begun to release some photos via the Bunya Productions Facebook page.
Back in December, Sen told us “It’s a murder-mystery. It’s about an Aboriginal detective who has to solve the murders of these young Aboriginal girls found under the highway and out of town, and he has to thread his way through the race relations of the town and the local drug scenes just to solve the cases. It will have a very strong Western influence to the film as well. It’s a bit of a cowboy, I call him a cowboy detective…And there’s a big shoot-out in the film at the end, which I’m looking forward to doing”.
He mentioned two other bits of information, both of which we can now see photographic evidence of. He mentioned that the film would be shot “around north-west New South Wales and also into Queensland, and certainly the outback of Queensland as well”. According to the Facebook page, the following is “a glimpse of the beautiful, rugged red country side where we’ll be filming”.
Sen also told us he’d be working with Daniel Connors, the remarkable young actor who took the lead in Toomelah. Today, Bunya Productions posted a photo of Daniel “ready to hit the spot of between the stars of Mystery Road…”
We are very excited about this Western, which Sen tells us that is influenced by the Coen Brothers No Country for Old Men, as “it’s a commercial film as well and it’s made quite a lot of money and had an impact on the international audience”. It will be great to see this genre revitalised in Australia, which has only had minimal impact over the last few decades with films such as The Proposition and Lucky Country.
