A limited documentary series · 3 × 60′
217 Days
The hunt for Dezi Freeman
It should have been over within days. It lasted two hundred and seventeen.
Two officers dead. One man in the high country. Seven months of questions.
26 August 2025 · Porepunkah, Victoria
A cold, overcast morning in the Victorian High Country.
Mid-morning
Ten police officers walk up a remote farm track to execute a warrant at an isolated property.
Minutes later
Two officers are dead. A third is seriously wounded. The gunman has escaped into the Victorian High Country.
217 days
The hunt begins.
Series pitch · logline
How does an obscure bushman become the most wanted man in Australian history?
A routine police warrant becomes a national tragedy, triggering Australia's largest manhunt. Over 217 days, a nation follows the search as an extraordinary story of family, community and unanswered questions slowly unfolds.
Format · 3 × 60′ limited series.
Engine · A real-time investigation, told through the people who lived it.
Series synopsis
Australia's largest manhunt should have been over within days, if not hours. Instead, nothing went to plan.
Dezi Freeman fled on foot into the Victorian High Country carrying little more than a handgun stolen from the constable he'd just killed. Police threw every available resource at finding him, yet every search ended the same way. Nothing. As days became weeks and weeks became months, the questions only grew more unsettling. He had survived the freezing winter. Then summer arrived, bringing bushfires. Still, there was no sign of him.
Eventually, police reached what they believed was the only possible conclusion. Dezi Freeman had to be dead. The manhunt had become a search for a body. Then everything changed. When Dezi Freeman was finally found alive after seven months on the run, just twenty minutes from his brother's home, Australia was left asking a different question. How was this possible? Was he an extraordinary survivalist, or did Australia's most wanted fugitive have accomplices helping him stay alive? And what finally changed after months without a breakthrough?
217 Days unfolds in real time through the eyes of the people living the manhunt. As each episode uncovers new evidence, fresh intelligence and unexpected revelations, the investigation builds towards the dramatic final siege that ends Australia's largest manhunt, while exposing new questions about the seven months that came before it.
The largest police operation in Australian history came to a valley of orchards and caravan parks.
Why now
The headlines told Australia what happened.
217 Days reveals what happened next, and what the public never saw.
Built on exclusive access to the people who lived it, the series brings together family members, neighbours, journalists, searchers and key witnesses for the first time, uncovering the human story behind Australia's largest manhunt.
The promise of the series
Each episode begins with what Australia thinks it knows, then turns it inside out.
The ambush. The bushman. The sovereign citizen. The chase. The shorthand wrote itself within hours. This series asks the questions the shorthand buried:
How does Australia's most wanted man survive seven months in country crawling with searchers?
Was he an extraordinary survivalist, or did he have accomplices keeping him alive?
What finally changed, after months without a breakthrough?
The official version was written on Day 1. The evidence is still arriving.
The officers
Two men went to work and did not come home.
Two lights. Touch each one.
Senior Constable Neal Thompson was eight weeks from retirement. Senior Constable Vadim De Waart-Hottart was 35, with most of his career still ahead of him. Their deaths changed families, colleagues and an entire community.
While 217 Days follows Australia's largest manhunt, it never loses sight of the people whose lives were forever changed on 26 August 2025. Their families now carry this story forward.
A growing threat
Thirty-two months before Porepunkah, there was Wieambilla.
In December 2022, Australia was confronted with one of its deadliest acts of anti-government violence when two police officers and a neighbour were murdered at Wieambilla, Queensland. The attack brought sovereign citizen ideology into the national spotlight and fundamentally changed how police viewed the threat.
As Australia's largest manhunt unfolded, comparisons were quickly drawn between the two cases. Rather than accepting those comparisons at face value, 217 Days examines the evidence, the competing perspectives and the events that shaped one of Australia's most significant national tragedies.
Years before the manhunt, he was on national television, pleading that the system was against him. Everyone changed the channel.
The world of the series
A valley of orchards, WWOOFers and quiet arrangements.
This is not a compound story. It is a farm that took in volunteer workers, the way farms here have since 1981. A couple who gave a struggling family a place to park a bus. A tourist valley under Mount Buffalo where everyone waves on the road. The horror of the series is how ordinary all of it was, right up until the morning it wasn't.
Evidence & timeline · the signature graphic of the series
Two hundred and seventeen days.
The clock stops at 8:30 a.m. The questions start.
The ground · interactive terrain
Time was on his side. So was the ground.
Every place the story touched, in one living relief map: the valley where it began, the escape theories of the first week as reported by The Australian, the plateau that hid him, the fires that moved him, and the container where it ended. Built in the show's own graphics language.
He fled into the one place in Australia built to keep a secret.
The investigation · the questions
Seven months of searching. Seven questions that survived it.
The decision not to send a tactical team, for a man whose fear of police was on file for years, will be the inquest's first question.
1,700 pieces of intelligence, a command post in Bright, cadaver dogs, caves, mineshafts, ropes into gorges. Nothing.
One gunshot, heard minutes after he vanished. Suicide, warning, or misdirection: the acoustic reconstruction is a set piece of the series.
How does a man survive an alpine winter alone, and surface 150 kilometres away beside a shipping container? Locals ask a harder question: did he do it alone?
Exhibit A · obtained by this production · never made public
There is footage from inside the bus, filmed as the warrant was served.
It does not change what he did. It changes every question about how it was allowed to happen: the minutes of pleading, the state of his mind, and the moment it broke. The series will treat it under legal advice, with the coroner's process and the families' welfare placed first. Buyers will understand: this is the piece of evidence the whole country will be arguing about.
The property from the air. Exhibit A was filmed somewhere under those trees.
The reckoning
Two inquests. Every minute on the record.
The deaths of the officers, and the death of the man who killed them, are now before the State Coroner. Nothing about that morning, or the seven months that followed it, will stay off the record: a public inquest is expected from 2027.
The official version
"Today, an evil man is dead. It's over."
The Premier of Victoria · 30 Mar 2026
The version his family lives with
"He wasn't born this. Something built him. And nobody stopped it."
Composite of family testimony · pre-interviews
Between those two sentences sits the entire series.
What the record will show: the warrant, the risk assessment, the final three hours. Nothing asserted before the coroner rules.
The afterlife
A valley trying to give the story back.
Porepunkah did nothing, and got the sieges, the roadblocks, the empty cafes and the name. Meanwhile the internet built a myth: memes casting Freeman as a modern bushranger, heir to Mad Dog Morgan and Ned Kelly, whose armour fell forty minutes up the road at Glenrowan. Police caution a man for carrying Freeman's face on a placard. This is Kelly country: Australia has been arguing about armed men in this bush for 150 years. The series puts the myth-making itself on camera, and on trial.
The helicopters are gone. What they were circling is still down there.
Episode one
Day One
A cold morning, a routine warrant, and twenty minutes that end with two officers dead and a man walking into the bush. As the largest manhunt in Australian history erupts around Mount Buffalo, the episode asks the question the sirens drown out: who is Dezi Freeman? A farmer who saw it happen, a neighbour who spent years afraid, and the former outlaw biker raided on Day 6 begin an answer nobody expects.
Episode question
How does an obscure bushman become the most wanted man in the country overnight?
Out on
"He didn't need help. He only needed the bush."
Episode two
The Gathering Storm
While the search grinds through spring, the episode walks back down the years: a doctrine that arrived with the lockdowns, a tribunal that "indicted" a premier, a massacre at Wieambilla that should have been the warning, and the man locals call the puppet master, who wound Dezi up and let him go. The funerals. The million-dollar reward. His wife's plea for surrender, broadcast into an empty valley. And in the bush, dozens of calibrated gunshots, fired to reconstruct a single echo.
Episode question
Who winds a man like this up, and who lets him go?
Out on
Gunfire, echoing off canyon walls, into empty country.
Episode three
217 Days
A brother opens the family album and a harder question: was Dezi broken, or built? The footage from inside the bus reframes the twenty minutes before the first shot. Then summer: lightning, fire, and a cloaked figure beside a shipping container on the Murray. Three hours of negotiation. Eight rifles. And a valley, a family and a force left holding everything the helicopters never found. And a country splits him into martyr and monster, while the people who actually knew him hold the harder middle.
Episode question
Was Dezi Freeman broken, or built? And who gets to answer?
Final image
Not the container. Fog on Mount Buffalo, and two lights that stay lit.
Visual language · filming approach
Alpine cold. Ordinary rooms. No re-enacted violence, ever.
Anamorphic photography across the seasons the manhunt actually spanned: winter snowgum, spring searchlines, summer fire, autumn endgame. Vérité with the valley as the inquests unfold. Interviews lit like the kitchens and sheds people actually live in. A deep bench of archive: news, aerials, court audio, body-worn material as released. Violence is never staged. Absence is staged instead: an empty track, a cold gate, a bus with the door open.
CGI & graphics
A living terrain system carries the geography: the relief map you flew through two chapters ago is the show's own cartography, built from the real ranges. A 217-day evidence clock structures every episode. Acoustic-echo visualisation turns one gunshot into a set piece. This deck is built in the series' graphics language: what you are reading is the pilot for how it will look.
Cast · contributors · access & reporting plan
The people who were actually there are already talking to us.
Development access by Last Word Entertainment. Extensive pre-interviews are complete; no contributor is announced until they have consented on their own terms, and none is paid for testimony.
The footage from inside the bus, filmed as the warrant was served
ObtainedAndy & Rebecca Swift, whose farm it happened on; Andy drove the wounded officer to the ambulance
Pre-interviewedJames Filby, Dezi's brother, keeper of the family archive and its hardest questions
Pre-interviewedA former neighbour who fought him through the courts for two years
Pre-interviewedA Buffalo Creek local who watched the escalation across a decade
Pre-interviewedA former outlaw biker whose property was raided on Day 6 as a suspected accomplice
Pre-interviewedThe man locals call the puppet master, on camera and on the record
Contact establishedExtremism researchers, criminologists and de-radicalisation specialists
In active developmentVictoria Police, the Police Association, searchers and negotiators
Approach plannedThe officers' families and colleagues
Family-first · in their time
Court files, family albums, chest-camera tapes, seven months of news archive: a record waiting to be read properly.
Comparable titles
Proven appetite. Unwritten ending.
American Manhunt
The anatomy of a nation-stopping search, told from inside it. DEZI brings that scale to a story no one outside Australia has heard end to end, with the ending still being written.
Waco: American Apocalypse
Anti-government belief, a siege, law-enforcement loss and archive that puts you in the room. The closest tonal relative to the Thologolong endgame.
Wind River
The tonal compass: snow country, grief and procedure, tension built from terrain and patience rather than spectacle. That register, brought to documentary.
A national obsession, reopened from the inside: exclusive access, an unseen exhibit, and an ending Australia is still arguing about.
Australia remembers the helicopters.
This series remembers Neal Thompson and Vadim De Waart-Hottart.