‘Twice Colonized’ Review: An Indigenous Activist Defends Her People’s Rights While Tending to Personal Wounds
variety.comGuy Lodge Film Critic An unusual credit appears at the beginning of “Twice Colonized,” Lin Alluna’s candid documentary portrait of Greenlandic lawyer and activist Aaju Peter, and it belongs to the film’s subject-star herself. “Lived by Aaju Peter” runs the text, and while that phrasing might initially seem a cute quirk, it proves fitting enough as Alluna’s camera follows her for seven years: In that time, Peter has an awful lot of difficult living to do, as she navigates personal tragedy and domestic abuse while making a name for herself as an outspoken campaigner for the rights of her fellow Inuit and other Indigenous people. “Twice Colonized” doesn’t treat her personal life as a background to her professional one, or vice versa.
Rather, the film holds both narratives in balance, each informing the other, and both equally essential to understanding this defiantly singular woman.
As a character study, then, “Twice Colonized” has a curiosity and a complexity that distinguish it from various other admiring activist portraits in the documentary sphere: Formidable as Peter’s achievements are, Alluna isn’t out merely to gild them.
For her part, Peter is reluctant to be made either a symbol or a martyr on camera, as she repeatedly corrects those who patronize or romanticize her mission to secure rights and recognition for her people from the cultures that colonized them.
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