ELLIS PARK – J Flix

Friday 20 February  2026

7.00pm

Tickets $18.00 / Concession $16.00 (Pensioner, Senior card holder, Student under 17, ID Required) – ($15.00 NFS members special price – use your NFS code in the promo code box Limit 2 tickets)

Australian musician Warren Ellis takes us on a guided tour through his world and one very special animal sanctuary.

Warren Ellis is a multi-award-winning musician and film composer he is an in-demand producer and writer, working with artists including Nick cave and Marianne Faithful.

Ellis plays the violin, piano, accordion, bouzouki, guitar, flute, mandolin, mandocello and viola. He has cut a brilliant and unorthodox figure in music for over three decades.

Far from the international concert halls in which he has plied his craft lies a very different passion project: a wildlife sanctuary in the forests of Sumatra. Co-founded by Ellis and spearheaded by the indomitable Femke den Haas, whose dedicated team of conservationist’s rescues trafficked and mistreated animals and then devotes years to nursing them back to health.

This fly-on-the-wall documentary offers both a deeply personal insight into one artist’s life through the act of creating and an inspiring reminder of how much can be achieved when working together.

Veterinarian paramedic nurse Femke Den Haas has been working in Indonesia for over 20 years largely focusing on saving animals from human captivity. She works to either repatriate them to the wild, or where this is not possible, to find them a place where they can live out their days with dignity. Warren was immediately struck by both the need and the work Femke and her team was doing to try and meet this need.

About ELLIS PARK

Ellis Park is strategically located on adjoining land next to the Sumatra Wildlife Center and provides long term care for those that cannot be released into the wild. Led by Femke Den Haas, a dynamic Dutch born paramedic veterinarian, dedicating her life to the protection of animals in Indonesia. She has a young son, Rio, who also helps and has grown up in Indonesia. As well as running the park she uses wildlife protection dogs trained to sniff out wildlife. They patrol the harbor with Femke and her team and, together with the police, they uncover smuggled wildlife – birds in PVC piping, eagles and kites destined for Saudi Arabia, baby monkeys for the black market.

Many animals do not survive the smuggling and those that are found require a lot of medical care and rehab to nurse them back to health. The rescue work is inherently dramatic, her team has been shot at multiple times.

DIRECTOR JUSTIN KURZEL’s STATEMENT:

I caught up with Warren at the Cannes Film Festival in 2022 and over a cup of coffee he told me what he had been up to during COVID. ‘I have made a couple albums, scored a few films, written a book and I bought some land in Sumatra at a wildlife sanctuary for abused and trafficked animals. Thus, this documentary was born.

Duration:1 hours 25 mins, interval TBC