Ellis Park

Warren Ellis is the musician known from the Dirty Three and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. The documentary takes him to two places: to his ageing parents in Ballarat, Australia, and to the animal sanctuary in Sumatra he helped bring into being. The subject is not music but going a long way in order to settle with your own past. The sanctuary holds animals rescued from trafficking and abuse, and Ellis travels there to meet Femke den Haas, the activist he co-founded it with, face to face for the first time. The form is observational; the camera follows, explains nothing and stages nothing. There is concert footage, but the film refuses to be a music documentary. It is Justin Kurzel's first documentary. Kurzel was known for hard fiction work, and the gentleness of the tone here is unexpected. It screened in Melbourne and reached cinemas in Britain and Ireland in 2025. Who it is for: viewers who like musician portraits and observational documentary about animal rescue. Who it is not for: anyone wanting background on Ellis' music; the film does not narrate a career and hardly bothers to inform you at all.