Four years after winning a prize at the Hot Docs pitch forum in 2019, Danish filmmaker Lin Alluna’s Twice Colonized is coming full circle, returning to open the festival on Thursday night (April 27).

A Canadian-Danish-Greenland coproduction, Twice Colonized follows Greenlandic Inuit lawyer and activist Aaju Peter as she works to bring the two colonizing countries that affected her culture and community — Canada and Denmark — to justice, as well as her efforts to reclaim her Inuktitut language and establish an Indigenous forum at the European Union, all while grieving her son’s death.

Although the doc made its world premiere at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, director Alluna and producer Alethea Arnaquq-Baril of Nunavut-based Red Marrow Media say they always planned to not only have Canada and Denmark provide funding for the film, but also to screen it at prominent documentary festivals in both countries — a goal that, following the film’s opening-night screening at Copenhagen’s CPH:DOX earlier this year, they are about to complete with the doc’s return to the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival.

In 2019, Twice Colonized picked up the the Corus-Hot Docs Forum Pitch Prize for that year’s best Canadian pitch. But, speaking with Playback sister publication Realscreen ahead of the doc’s Toronto premiere, Alluna and Arnaquq-Baril recall a skeptical question at the forum from a buyer at a European TV channel, who asked how Alluna would maintain control of the doc given that Peter is both the main character and a screenwriter on the film.

As Arnaquq-Baril notes, Twice Colonized presents a special case in regards to the issue of consent and collaboration between a documentary filmmaker and their subjects. As a writer on the doc, Peter not only worked with the filmmakers to develop scenes and ensure she was aligned with Alluna about the film’s purpose, but also received a salary and participated in a revenue-sharing agreement whereby Alluna, Peter and the producers would all receive equal shares.

Other producers on the film include Red Marrow Media’s Stacey Aglok MacDonald, Emile Hertling Péronard of Greenland’s Ánorâk Film, and Bob Moore of Montreal’s EyeSteelFilm.

“When you’re asking someone to pour their guts out and put their life on screen, sometimes at personal risk — which is not uncommon in documentary — I think everything, all the hierarchies, need to be reconsidered,” says Arnaquq-Baril, an Inuit filmmaker from Canada who has known Peter for most of her life, and worked with her previously on the 2016 doc Angry Inuk. “Considering the safety issues at hand, the amount of oppression our youth has experienced, and the severity and frequency with which we’ve been misrepresented in the world, I think it was absolutely appropriate.”

For her part, Alluna met Peter seven years ago, and as their relationship grew she learned more about the Indigenous perspective on Denmark’s colonization of Greenland, challenging what she’d learned in school. It was these conversations, Alluna says, that imbued her with a sense of responsibility to expose her homeland’s colonial history and illustrate the present-day effects of colonization in both Europe and Canada — as well as to frame these issues through the perspective of someone she finds to be a powerfully inspiring figure.

“For me, a hero is not someone who’s perfect or superhuman. It’s someone like Aaju, who is really doing something to change the world,” Alluna says.

Nonetheless, Arnaquq-Baril notes that Peter wanted to show through her own depiction on screen that leaders can be dealing with a great deal of personal trauma behind the scenes of their work — but, at the same time, that her own struggles are only a facet of an all-too-common struggle faced by other Inuit. “She talked a lot about being an imperfect person and wanting the world to know that imperfect people can do important work, and that anybody can struggle with loss and grief and domestic violence, and still be able to push through and do important things,” Arnaquq-Baril says.

“If you have been through something hard or you’re struggling, that doesn’t have to define you as a weak person,” Alluna adds. “You can still be this strong person who makes a difference. I really hope that people will feel empowered in that way and inspired by Aaju.”

As part of their collaboration on the project, during production Alluna and Peter would continually discuss what they were trying to accomplish with the film, and the values they wanted it to embody. Those conversations continued during the edit, as Peter had strong feelings about what to include and omit from the film. One sequence that Peter pushed to include was footage with her graduating class of Inuktitut learners, because of how proud she feels to have reclaimed her language and helped teach it to others.

Another decision was to remove, just months before the film’s Sundance premiere, a scene of a discussion with a group of friends who were worried about Peter. Although the filmmakers had the consent of all involved, Peter felt that the conversation was too intensely personal to leave in the film. Instead, Alluna and her team worked with Peter to create an abstract dream sequence in which Peter is sleeping, and a voice is heard speaking lines that match what her friends were telling her. The result, Alluna says, is even stronger and more powerful than what was initially shot.

Alluna checked in regularly with those featured in the film to assure she still had their consent, and showed a cut to some of the participants in both Greenland and Denmark to get their feedback about how they and Peter were represented in the film. Arnaquq-Baril notes that while this project is a unique case — a white director working with a team of Inuit producers and a willful, determined primary subject — she hopes that the film can raise important discussions about consent and collaboration in the documentary field.

“With a film like this, that is so intensely personal and delicate, consent is so important. Sometimes I think filmmakers can get away with getting a release signed at the start of filming, and then things unfold in a way that the subjects may not have expected, and then is it ethical still to keep those things in a film?” she says.

“To tell a truth that the world needs to hear, sometimes it is important, if you’re speaking truth to power. But in a situation where you’re dealing with vulnerable or marginalized people, it’s a different dynamic.”

Twice Colonized screens at Hot Docs on Thursday (April 27), with subsequent screenings on April 28 and May 1.

This story originally appeared in Realscreen

Image courtesy of Hot Docs