Ellis Park: a Warren Ellis documentary in synch with its generous subject

Partway through this engrossing documentary, as its ostensible subject, musician Warren Ellis, is discussing his early career and troubled teenage homelife in Australia, he’s reminded by the director, Justin Kurzel, that they’re soon heading to the Indonesian animal rescue facility Ellis has co-founded. “Gonna be a two-parter, then?” Ellis says. But, to both men’s credit, these seemingly disparate studies, of a wildlife sanctuary and the sanctuary music allows from a turbulent life, come together with such resonance.

Given Kurzel’s muscular, often violent, track record in fiction (Snowtown, 2011; Macbeth, 2015; The Order, 2024), the gentle lyricism and compassion of his first documentary feature might seem incongruous. But he quickly puts himself in sync with Ellis’s almost shamanistic approach to music, tuning into plangent frequencies in the air, whether in a Parisian studio or Sumatran forests.

Though the park may bear Ellis’s name and presumably benefits from his high profile, the film – and Ellis himself – generously focus on its other co-founder and director Femke den Haas and her devoted group of conservationists. They work tirelessly to disrupt the region’s lucrative animal trafficking (be warned, there are distressing archive scenes of suffering, particularly some long-tailed macaques forced into roadside dancing monkey servitude), as well as rehabilitating and nurturing those creatures that they rescue. Rather than see themselves as saviours, however, Den Haas’s team talk of their gratitude: for them, it’s mutual healing.

One can see Ellis’s humbled, wide-eyed appreciation of this restorative existence, and how that connects to his own ethos of giving back through artistic transformation. After Nina Simone’s performance at Nick Cave’s London Meltdown festival in 1999, Ellis swiped her chewing gum and had it turned into a sculpture and spiritual totem; he brings this as an offering to the sanctuary.

It’s also present in scenes of the rapprochement with his elderly parents, particularly his ailing father John, himself a musician. When Ellis improvises along to one of his father’s compositions, there’s a poignant acknowledgement of those unable to fully realise their own creative needs. Ellis confesses that playing concerts has “always been my way of dealing with stuff”; and it’s that shared communion with others, in a spirit of generous offering, that brings together both the music and activism here: best encapsulated by a simple shot of Ellis, head bowed in concentration, feverishly playing his violin, amid, and inspired by, the untamed haven of the jungle.

► Ellis Park is in UK cinemas from 26 September.