CinefestOz Film Festival launches 2025 season with a preview of "Mystery Road: Origin"
Cinefest Oz Film Festival, a celebration of local Western Australian filmmaking kicks off its 2025 season on the 30th of August at Orana Cinema in Busselton with a special preview of Mystery Road: Origin.
Emerging as a standalone film in 2013, Mystery Road first began as an aesthetically and thematically confident Neo-Noir from director/writer Ivan Sen, a Gamilaroi filmmaker whose career involved an impressive series of documentaries through the Australian Broadcast Commission and powerful short and feature dramas such as Wind (1998), Beneath Clouds (2002) and Toomelah (2011).
Even at this early stage, Sen’s fictional and documentary works demonstrate a desire to capture the ambivalence of Indigenous experience in Australia, often centring on characters caught between several worlds and dealing with the weight of historical oppression forcing its way into the present moment.
In Mystery Road, Sen found mainstream appeal without sacrificing the philosophical depth of his previous work, bringing in legendary actors Hugo Weaving, Jack Thompson and Jack Charles, as well as relatively lesser-known figures such as Aaron Pedersen, whose masterful portrayal of the Indigenous detective Jay Swan earned him critical and popular acclaim.
Buoyed by this success, Mystery Road would first spawn a film sequel in 2016 with Goldstone, as well as a spin-off TV series in 2018. The television adaptation maintained Pedersen in the central role, but tinkered with different contexts and filmmakers, shifting to various locations in northern Western Australia (Season 1: Wyndham and Kununurra, Season 2: Broome and the Kimberely) and bringing in legends of Australian cinema Rachel Perkins, Warwick Thornton and Wayne Blair, not to mention the standout performances of Judy Davis, Ernie Dingo and Jada Alberts.
In July 2022, a new spin on the now flourishing corpus emerged, marked by the updated name Mystery Road: Origin. This resignification points to the temporal shift induced by the now third-series, returning to Jay Swan’s earlier years as a newbie detective in his hometown. Returning to the past curiously offered new possibilities for the cast and crew configuration, as Mark Coles Smith took on the role of the younger Swan, Tuuli Narkle as Mary Allen, not to mention talented emerging filmmaker Dylan River taking on directorial responsibilities.
With the advent of the fourth season of the show and the second iteration of the Origin component, the series follows where it left off with Jay Swan and Mary Allen venturing to the logging town of Loch Iris to create a new life together. As the gothic and folk horror elements of the arborescent environment begin to creep out of the shadows, the series unravels the disavowed secrets of the town, as well as the bonds between Jay and Mary.
CLICK HERE to get your tickets to this special Busselton preview screening of the first two episodes of Mystery Road: Origin, which includes a red carpet, welcome drink and a Q&A with the film crew after.
Click here for the full program of the Cinefest Ox Film Festival 2025 lineup!
