JOURNEY HOME, DAVID GULPILIL

Watch The Trailer

Storyline (warning: spoilers)

Warning for Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander people that the film contains images, voices and names of deceased persons

Journey Home, narrated by Hugh Jackman, with contributions from Limbo star Natasha Wanganeen and also featuring storytelling from Baker Boy is a thoughtful and sensitively told documentary. It provides the audience a remarkable insight into cultural practices that would normally remain far from the eyes of Balanda (non-Indigenous people, in Yolŋu Matha) as preparations are made for his Bäpurru (funeral).
There’s no understating the generosity of this gift. The writer-directors of this elegantly made and culturally illuminating documentary, Maggie Miles and Trisha Morton-Thomas, trace his last journey – a roughly 4,000km trip from, as narrator Hugh Jackman puts it, “a city at the bottom of Australia to a remote swamp at the top”. It says something about the eternal qualities of David Gulpilil that he continues to be at the centre of remarkable stories, even after his death.
There’s a lovely visual flourish early on: a shot of a creek overlaid with a monochrome image of Gulpilil in that same waterway, looking delighted. It’s a modest but powerful embellishment that collapses time and space; connecting past and present, and suggesting that perhaps time is not linear but fluid, capable of rippling and reforming like light on water.
Shot with a striking sense of place, Journey Home weaves together themes of identity, belonging, and the cost of disconnection. The pacing is meditative and emotionally resonant in the way that it invites viewers to walk alongside a man navigating the spaces between past and present—ultimately asking what it truly means to find one’s way home. It’s a tender and luminous documentary that treats its journey not as an event to be recorded, but an experience to be felt and remembered.