My Name is Gulpilil | Adelaide Festival 2021 review

More than a documentary, this is very much Aboriginal actor David Gulpilil’s story as seen through his own eyes.

My Name Is Gulpilil

My Name is Gulpilil

Film / AUS

FESTIVAL

Festival Theatre

March 12

As much a meditation on life – and potentially impending death – as it is a documentary, My Name is Gulpilil is very much the Aboriginal actor’s story as seen through his own eyes and told through his own words.

It’s testimony to his own strength that David Gulpilil is able to take to the Festival Theatre stage and introduce this film, when it was long expected that the cancer he is fighting would have meant it would be released posthumously.

My Name is Gulpilil is a slow and often ponderous affair, with lengthy shots of the actor struggling to achieve simple daily tasks with the help of his carer Mary, who gives as good as she gets in their delightful comic repartee.

As throughout his distinguished career, it is Gulpilil’s humour which continues to shine through in these most difficult and confronting times.

Director Molly Reynolds frames many beautiful shots, from the opening sequence in which Gulpilil follows an emu along a dirt track – only to turn around and have it follow him back toward the camera.

Aboriginal actor David Gulpilil in the film Walkabout, released in 1971.

It echoes later excerpts of a young Gulpilil, performing an emu dance with his troupe, which toured widely.

In the same way, his trips to and from the mailbox at the end of his current home’s driveway in Murray Bridge are detailed at painstaking length.

Archival footage documenting Gulpilil’s first role as a teenager in UK filmmaker Nicholas Roeg’s Walkabout in 1969, and his subsequent world travels, provides many of the highlights.

Other celebrity encounters are recounted in humorous anecdotes from a recording of his 2004 one-man show – which was directed by Neil Armfield, now one of the Adelaide Festival’s artistic directors.

Most moving are Gulpilil’s tearful reunions with family members and his desire to return to his home country of northeast Arnhem Land.

However, it would help viewers if more of these sequences were subtitled with translations and to identify other people, whose relationships to Gulpilil we are often left to guess. Some of his own contemporary dialogue would also benefit from captions.

David Gulpilil with fellow actor Gary Sweet, right, in a scene from The Tracker.

There are spectacular scenes from his performances in such film classics as Storm Boy, The Tracker and Ten Canoes, and more archival footage that reminds us how remarkable Gulpilil is as a dancer and custodian of Indigenous ritual.

His troubles with the law and incarceration are briefly glossed over. Instead, we bear witness to the repercussions of his long battle with alcoholism and drug use.

Arguably, there is much more of interest to be gleaned from the archives in a more conventional documentary of Gulpilil’s life and career – but this film is his version of the story, the way he wants to tell it.

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