User Reviews

I consider myself fortunate to have seen this film on the opening night of the HotDox festival in Toronto where it met an enthusiastic and engaged audience. If you go to this film with the expectation of some kind of detailed exposition of Inuit culture or the history of colonization of Nunavut or Greenland then perhaps you will be disappointed like one of the early reviewers on IMDB clearly was. While these topics form part of the context for Twice Colonized, it is far more focused on a period in the life of its main subject and co-writer, Inuk lawyer Aaju Peter. From this reviewer's perspective, that is its greatest strength and what makes it so moving rather than a mark against it.

The film follows a period in Aaju's life when she is faced with the suicide of her son, sending the film on an emotionally charged trajectory. Aaju is an Inuk originally from Greenland who was sent to Denmark to live with various Danish families as part of Denmark's experimentation with assimilation programs not all that dissimilar from the residential and day schools for Indigenous assimilation in Canada or the 60s scoop where non-Indigenous people were encouraged to adopt Indigenous children based on similar thinking that assimilation would be for their own good. The film begins with a clear intention from Aaju to reconcile herself with this part of her own story, as well as how she was colonized a second time when she left Greenland for Nunavut after being alienated for no longer speaking her mother tongue. But two personal stories are also woven into this narrative: one of a grieving mother who is trying to move on from the traumatic death of her son; and one of a Inuk woman trapped in an abusive relationship with a white man she just can't seem to leave for good. It is the way in which these stories are interwoven that gives this film its power.

While many other films grapple with the traumas of settler colonialism, often the focus has been on the most egregious examples like the widespread sexual abuse in the residential schools. The focus on this Danish assimilation experiment brings into focus another aspect of settler colonialism that has received far less attention, perhaps because it is subtle and hard to capture: all of these assimilation policies tried to turn Indigenous people into Europeans and they failed miserably at it, resulting in fractured identities and societies. Rather than lecturing the audience on the immorality of settler colonialism, this film gives us a rare privileged glimpse of the personal, individual struggles that flow from it.

Aaju is presented as a complex and conflicted protagonist in this film. There is no resolution of her story in a Hollywood sense of closure. She is a passionate advocate but also someone with a great deal of anger and chaos to work through and the audience is brought into that process. We see the psychological and social impacts of settler colonialism through her as a case study of sorts, but we also follow her efforts to find meaning and direction through her co-writing of the film itself, making it a far more personal journey. In many ways we take part in Aaju's journey to heal as the documentary takes us on an uncertain trajectory that never achieves a tidy, final resolution.

You may feel challenged by Aaju's views on settler colonialism but you will never feel preached to. Instead, this is like being invited into an intimate conversation with Aaju that pushes you to feel the grief, confusion, and chaos of what it is like to look for narrative coherence after a twice failed colonization.