To start with, there have already been a couple of documentaries about Gulpilil, including the 2021 My Name Is Gulpilil, where he speaks at length directly to the viewer.<\/p>\n
What Journey Home, David Gulpilil seems meant to add to the portrait isn\u2019t more information about his films, nor about his personal ups and downs. Rather, the goal is to return him to the cultural context from which he emerged \u2013 although, as we\u2019re told in a variety of ways, his singular destiny was to exist between worlds, to the point where he was at home nowhere and everywhere.<\/p>\n
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As viewers, we might equally wonder exactly what audience is being addressed here, and by whom. There\u2019s no straightforward answer, given that the filmmakers also come from different backgrounds: Morton-Thomas is an Anmatyerr woman from the Northern Territory, while Miles was born and raised in the UK.<\/p>\n
As if mirroring this, the film has two alternating voiceover narrators: the Yolngu rapper Danzal Baker, otherwise known as \u201cBaker Boy\u201d, and Hugh Jackman, who bonded with Gulpilil on the set of Australia but speaks in the third person rather than as a friend.<\/p>\n
By traditional standards of filmmaking craft, Journey Home, David Gulpilil is on the messy side: there are a lot of family members to keep track of, and the filmmakers too often fall back on stock \u201cpoetic\u201d devices such as slow motion or drone shots of bushland.<\/p>\n
Ultimately, a good deal of what\u2019s shown is accessible to outsiders only to a point, despite the parallels Baker points out between Yolngu ceremony and showbiz rituals such as walking the red carpet.<\/p>\n
The film is a bit all over the place, but perhaps that\u2019s exactly how it should be \u2013 and however it\u2019s judged as a documentary, as a document, it\u2019s invaluable and moving.<\/p>\n
Reviewed by Jake Wilson<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"To start with, there have already been a couple of documentaries about Gulpilil, including the 2021 My Name…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":247706,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[64,63,134,344],"class_list":{"0":"post-247705","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-movies"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247705","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=247705"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247705\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/247706"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=247705"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=247705"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=247705"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}