SBS doc on Gulpilil proves restraint isn't boring, it's just rare

REVIEWS · REVIEW

Journey Home, David Gulpilil—the AATA Best Documentary Award winner now streaming—shows what happens when a film trusts its subject enough to stop shouting.

A documentary about the late David Gulpilil's return to Country in Arnhem Land has opened on SBS On Demand this week, and it has done something increasingly unusual in 2026: it declined to be "important."

Directed by Trisha Morton-Thomas and Maggie Miles, and made in close collaboration with Gulpilil's family, Journey Home, David Gulpilil is a film that moves at the speed of ceremony—which is to say, slowly, carefully, and without the edits. There is no narrator voice explaining why you should cry. There is no soaring string section telling you when emotion is permitted. The AATA jury noted "the singular dignity of its restraint," which is a way of saying: this film does not insult your intelligence by adding a soundtrack to grief.

The film's first 82 minutes are deceptively plain. Gulpilil's family speak. Archive footage rolls. A body is prepared for its journey. Nothing is dramatised. The camera does not linger on reactions; it simply holds. At 1 hour 36 minutes total, the film could have been padded to feature length with talking-head testimonials, slow-mo footage of the Arnhem Land landscape, or the kind of musical swells that make suburban documentarians feel directorial. Instead, it stays close to the actual event: the return, the ceremony, the Country receiving its person back.

The closing 14 minutes—the ceremony itself—contain some of the most moving footage in Australian cinema this decade. Not because they are scored or lit or framed for maximum emotional extraction. Because they are left alone. Because Gulpilil's life and work and humour are trusted to mean something without editorial hand-holding.

This is a film that is also funny in the places Gulpilil was funny—which is important, because a hagiography would have flattened him into a symbol. Instead, he remains a person: complicated, talented, alive in the archive, and now returned to where he belongs.

**Rating: ★★★★☆**

It should be on every school curriculum. At press time, a Marrickville high-school English teacher named Kath, 58, had reportedly texted her department head the SBS link with the caption "this is what we should be showing instead of that godawful play unit," and had not received a response.

The film does not insult your intelligence by adding a soundtrack to grief.— Brainrot Desk

Filed by Pete Clark — The Brainrot Desk

Source: https://www.sbs.com.au