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This is the story of a band that grew up but never grew apart. Jebediah exploded onto the Australian music scene in the 1990s, becoming one of the country’s most beloved bands. Their thirty-year journey is a celebration of friendship, creativity, and staying connected against the odds.
A Film by Arlo Dean Cook
Directed and Written by Arlo Dean Cook
Produced and Co-written by Brooke Tia Silcox
Cinematography and Edit by Arlo Dean Cook
Executive Producers Sarah Wiegard and Brendan Hutchens
A Film by Arlo Dean Cook
Directed and Written by Arlo Dean Cook
Produced and Co-written by Brooke Tia Silcox
Cinematography and Edit by Arlo Dean Cook
Executive Producers Sarah Wiegard and Brendan Hutchens
This is the story of a band that grew up but never grew apart. Jebediah exploded onto the Australian music scene in the 1990s, becoming one of the country’s most beloved bands. Their thirty-year journey is a celebration of friendship, creativity, and staying connected against the odds.
Arlo Dean Cook – Writer/Director/Cinematographer/Editor
Victorian based, Adelaide born 27.12.1983
Arlo Dean Cook is an Australian writer, director, cinematographer and editor whose work is deeply rooted in music and visual storytelling. Over the past decade he has directed and filmed more than eighty music videos for artists including Jebediah, Tim Rogers, Bob Evans, Phil Jamieson, Greta Ziller and Andrew Swift.
His work is characterised by an intimate observational style and a strong sense of rhythm, developed through years of collaboration with musicians and performers. As both a filmmaker and lifelong music fan, Cook brings a unique perspective to stories about creativity, identity and artistic endurance.
Jebediah: Are We OK? marks his feature documentary directorial debut and is the culmination of an eleven-year creative relationship with the band. Through unprecedented access and decades of archival material, Cook crafts a deeply personal portrait of one of Australia’s most enduring musical friendships.
I never set out to become a filmmaker. For most of my early creative life I was chasing music – playing in bands, touring, and trying to build a sustainable life inside an industry that rarely allows for it. Over time, I began to understand how fragile that path is, but also how deeply it connects people who choose it.
Film arrived through that world. Working on music videos led me from writing into directing, cinematography and editing, and over time I realised film was where my instincts actually belonged – it brought together everything I cared about: music, rhythm, performance and emotion.
Jebediah: Are We OK? began when I was invited by bassist Vanessa Thornton to film Jebediah’s twentieth anniversary tour. I arrived as both a filmmaker and a long-time fan, but what stayed with me wasn’t nostalgia — it was the rare continuity between four people who had chosen, over and over again, to stay in a band together across decades.
As I spent time with them, I recognised something I had been circling in my own life: the question of what it takes to sustain a creative life over time, and what it costs to hold onto the friendships and identities formed in youth as adulthood reshapes everything around you.
During the making of the film I also became a father, which shifted my perspective further. Ideas around time, responsibility, creativity and endurance moved from abstract to immediate. The film became less about observing another band’s journey and more about understanding my own relationship to creative survival, family, and change.
What ultimately drew me to continue was not a single-story point, but the feeling underneath it – the sense that this was about endurance, connection, and the quiet, ongoing negotiation between who we were and who we become.
Arlo Dean Cook
