Director: Justin Kurzel

Australian director Justin ‘Snowtown’ Kurzel’s ‘Ellis Park’ is an unorthodox documentary: part profile of Dirty Three violinist and Nick Cave collaborator Warren Ellis, part depiction of the musician’s attempts to open a wildlife sanctuary. The early sequences, in which Ellis goes to his hometown of Ballarat and visits his parents (a one-time country singer dad who did actually put out a few records), and his irreverent mum, are the most enjoyable with Kurzel’s subjects exuding an Aussie amiability. In the film’s most striking moment, Kurzel’s camera swoops around Ellis as he performs one of his doomy portentous pieces in a Ballarat hall. A possibly false memory of the young Warren waking up to find the family garden full of clowns hints towards the unreliability of any documentary memoir. Ellis’s memories of moving to Melbourne, absorbing himself, for better or for worse, in its music/art demimonde, and meeting Cave are vivid and illuminating. Kurzel intersperses Ellis’s visit and youthful reminisces with his efforts to set up a wildlife sanctuary in Sumatra, Indonesia with his old Amsterdam friend and animal rights activist Femke den Haas. In the film’s third act, Ellis makes his way to the centre where the staff look after animals injured by traders in order to prepare them for a possible return to the wild. The sweet armless monkey Rina is the star of the show here. While heartfelt, the latter scenes drag a little and the pacing is a little too languorous, but the Indonesian forests are beautifully shot.

David Willoughby

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