Phoebe Marson Gulpilil says a new documentary about her father’s final journey home is also helping her heal after his death. Journey Home, David Gulpilil follows David Gulpilil’s 3,000-plus-kilometre return to the Northern Territory and the traditional funeral that followed.
She said the film reaches beyond the public image of the actor, who died of lung cancer in South Australia in November 2021 after more than four decades on screen. For Marson Gulpilil, watching that journey unfold again is not only about loss, but about family, country and the cultural life that shaped him.
The documentary records months of mourning ceremonies that moved through Murray Bridge, Darwin and Nhulunbuy in Arnhem Land before he was buried in Gupulul in 2022. Director and producer Maggie Miles worked with Yolŋu leader Witiyana Marika to film the funerary rites, turning one man’s last journey into a rare public record of a private and deeply cultural process.
Marson Gulpilil, who founded the Yolŋu-led consultancy Djarrka and recently curated the Melbourne exhibition One Red Blood, said her father’s story could never be separated from family, community and land. She said the film goes deeper into why he was the way he was, and into the sharing of Yolŋu culture that sat at the center of his life and work.
That is also where the film’s quiet friction lies. It is built around mourning rites and burial, yet she describes it as part of her own healing. By placing grief and ceremony in the same frame, the documentary becomes something more immediate than a memorial: it is a family reckoning with the loss while the memory of Gulpilil’s legacy is still fresh.
What remains unanswered is not whether the film matters, but which moments in it will stay with her most. For now, its weight comes from the fact that it preserves David Gulpilil’s return home in full, while also giving his daughter a way to meet that story again on her own terms.
