Ellis Park (Premiere Fund)

Legendary Australian musician Warren Ellis takes us on a guided tour through his world and one very special animal sanctuary.

A key member of iconic Australian bands The Dirty Three and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds as well as a prolific film score composer (The Proposition; Hell or High Water, MIFF 2016), multi-instrumentalist Ellis has cut a brilliant and unorthodox figure in Australian music for over three decades. Far from the international concert halls in which he has plied his craft, however, lies a very different passion project: a wildlife sanctuary in the forests of Sumatra. Co-founded by Ellis and spearheaded by the indomitable Femke den Haas, whose dedicated team of conservationists rescues trafficked and mistreated animals and then devotes years to nursing them back to health, Ellis Park is a beacon of kindness in a world that sometimes has precious little of it to spare.

Supported by the MIFF Premiere Fund, Ellis Park follows its subject from his childhood home in Ballarat – where he encounters formative sites and spends a tender afternoon in the company of his elderly parents – to his first, long-awaited visit to the park that bears his name. Along the way, it delves into Ellis’s expansive love of music and artistic history, illuminating the parallel evolutions in his multifaceted creative practice and commitment to the conservation cause. Directed by acclaimed Australian filmmaker Justin Kurzel (Nitram, MIFF 2021; Snowtown), this fly-on-the-wall documentary offers both a deeply personal insight into one artist’s life and an inspiring reminder of how much humans can achieve while working together.