As a child, the Inuk human rights lawyer Aaju Peter was sent far away from her native Greenland to live out her adolescence in Denmark, which has a long history of colonizing the island and which formally assumed its ongoing rule over it in 1814. Although Peter’s transfer to Denmark was viewed as a privilege for gifted children, she now sees it as a tragedy; it meant so profoundly losing touch with her culture that she had to re-learn her native language upon returning to Greenland as a young adult.
Peter’s childhood features centrally in the Danish director Lin Alluna’s documentary Twice Colonized, which tells the twinned stories of how Peter was colonized by the European nations that claimed ownership of her homeland, and how she has undertaken the work of decolonizing herself as a lawyer and advocate fighting for the autonomy of her culture. Alternatively poetic and political, intimate and historical, the film creates an emotionally rich, densely layered mosaic out of bits and pieces of Peter’s personal and professional life. Alluna has done excellent work in finding scenes and images that implicate numerous sides of her subject, while drawing in the web of relationships and power structures that surround her. Over the course of the film’s 90 minutes, these chunks add up to far more than the sum of their parts.
