TWICE COLONIZED

(director: Lin Alluna; screenwriter: Aaju Peter; cinematographers: David Bauer/Lin Alluna/Iris Ng/Glauco Bermudez; editor: Mark Bukdahl; music: Olivier Alary/Cellina Kalluk/Johanes Malfatti; cast: Aaju Peter; Runtime: 92; MPAA Rating: NR; producers: Emile Hertling Peronard/Alethea Arnaquq-Baril/Stacey Aglok MacDonald/Bob Moore; Anorak Film; 2023-Denmark/Canada/Greenland-in English, Danish, Inuktitut, Kalaallisut)

“It’s an inspirational, candid and intimate documentary on the fearless activist attorney for her Inuit people in Greenland.”

Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

Danish filmmaker Lin Alluna in her first documentary tells about the life of Aaju Peter, an activist attorney for the Greenland Inuit people. Peter’s, an Inuit from Greenland, educated in Denmark since childhood (which is the reason for the title) and currently living in Canada. She writes the script, and aims to confront the past sins against the Inuits in Greenland by its Danish colonizers. She also is fighting for her native people to be exempt from bans against seal hunting, claiming that’s the way her people have always earned a living. This ban (encouraged by animal rights activists), she claims is crippling her people’s traditional way of life and destroying them culturally–that groups like Greenpeace don’t understand her people’s traditions and refuse to understand the nuances of the seal hunt.

Her fight is also against the forced assimilation between the native people’s and their white rulers, as her fight is for the Inuit’s freedom under colonization.

Tragedy came to Peter’s life over her son’s suicide. We also learn she’s in an abusive relationship with a white man.

It’s an inspirational, candid and intimate documentary on the fearless activist attorney for her Inuit people in Greenland, who was observed over a period of seven years by the filmmaker.
 
It played at the Hot Docs & Sundance Film Festivals.



REVIEWED ON 5/8/2023  GRADE: B