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Ivan Sen’s Mystery Road begins filming in Qld

Ivan Sen's thriller Mystery Road has begun filming in the central Queensland town of Winton.

The film stars Aaron Pedersen as detective Jay Swan who returns home to an outback town to solve the murder of a teenage Indigenous girl, whose body is found under the trucking route highway out of town. The film also stars Hugo Weaving, Jack Thompson, Ryan Kwanten, Tony Barry, Tasma Walton, Damian Walshe-Howling, David Field, Robert Mammone and newcomers Trisha Whitton and Siobhan Binge.

Sen, who penned the script, has taken on multiple duties including director, cinematographer and editor. The film re-unites him with producer David Jowsey following their collaborations on Toomelah and Dreamland.

“Ivan Sen is one of Australia’s most gifted filmmakers who, with Mystery Road, has the opportunity to apply his prodigious talent to a broader canvas," Jowsey said in a statement. "Ivan’s screenplay strikes a distinctive balance between its unabashedly genre roots as a murder mystery and its perceptive cultural insights."

Indigenous tale Toomelah was critically acclaimed and premiered in the recent Cannes Film Festival's Un Certain Regard category.

Mystery Road will be released in Australia by Management of Doubt, a new local distributor, while international sales will be handled by Arclight.

The film has been financed with the assistance of Screen Australia, Screen Queensland and the ABC.

Contact this reporter at bswift@www.if.com.au or on Twitter at @bcswift.