Review of the relevant film Twice Colonized: Aaju Peter's life and activism

Aaju Peter tells a gathering of young kids, "It's no longer the why question. "How" is it." Peter is an Inuit lawyer from Greenland who also advocates for the rights of indigenous people all over the globe. She is the subject of Twice Colonized, the first full-length documentary by Danish filmmaker Lina Alluna that premiered at the 2023 Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival.

Twice Colonized explores the intimate to engage the public via its theme. First, we learn about Peter's life in detail, including how she was born in Greenland and later transported to Denmark by her parents for education, an event that deprived her of her home culture and her ability to speak her native tongue. She relocated to Nunavut after being married to a Canadian Inuk in Greenland a few years later. These specifics are followed by Alluna with a candor that emanates from her topic. In truth, there are intermittent humorous moments, such as when Peter calls her director "her colonizer" and describes how her violent current boyfriend—whom she is fighting to break up with—believes that she is dating Alluna.

Working with cinematographers Iris Ng, David Bauer, Glauco Bermudez, Alluna allows the narrative to be simultaneously punctuated by close-ups in the private moment's and go for wide shots when Peter positions herself in public spaces talking about indigenous rights, and gives a speech at the EU headquarters in Brussels. In one of the sequences when she sits with the change-makers and they discuss the arduous trip ahead, her look of serenity is crucial. Yet at one especially sensitive point, when she plays a tune her youngest son used to sing, she starts crying. Peter admits that he died by suicide when he was a young man. She claims that the prevalence of teen suicide has increased significantly over time, and that no one wants to talk about the struggles and disgrace that their people endure. Aaju Peter's motivation to fight comes from his grief, and Twice Colonized powerfully and subtly captures that.

In addressing how Peter's life assimilates itself to see the necessity for changes with respect to indigenous rights, the first half of Twice Colonized is startlingly sad. The second part, on the other hand, is more disjointed and focuses on her journey to recovery (by visiting locations and people in her homeland with her brother) before following her as she actively campaigns. When it comes to balancing out the narrative of Twice Colonized and moving towards the call to action in the various sporadic moments surrounding Peter's path as a human rights activist, these aspects go too far and broad and eventually fall short. By keeping the several points concealed into brief periods, Mark Bukdahl's editing rather attempts to give the harsh, consistently shocking topic justice; anything more purposefully convincing wouldn't have made the landscape of questions and comprehension work. The minimal and effective music by Olivier Alary, Celina Kalluk, and Johannes Malfatti successfully conveys the intensity of Peter's activism.
Twice Colonized is a powerful energy that magnifies the important discussions about the history and depiction of Inuit culture. Aaju Peter's intriguing personality forms and adds to this force. Whether one agrees with the viewpoint Peter takes or the language she chooses to speak in, the dialogue must be positioned first.