Hot Docs 2023: Festival opener Twice Colonized offers a deeply intimate, powerful portrait of an Indigenous hero

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Documentaries come together in all sorts of ways. A filmmaker stumbles across an interesting news article, or picks up on a thread from a friend, or decides to mine their own personal history. But the startling, beautiful, haunting and ultimately inspirational new doc Twice Colonized came together because Danish director Lin Alluna stopped a random woman on the street in Copenhagen.

“It was surreal – I just saw this person on a warm summer day walking near the Tivoli Gardens, and I knew that I had to speak with her. She stood out in a sea of tourists with her style and confidence,” recalls Alluna. After inviting the woman for coffee, Alluna discovered that her new friend was the noted Greenlandic Inuit lawyer and activist Aaju Peter – and it turned out that she had quite the story to tell.

Over the course of the following seven years, Alluna became Peter’s shadow, chronicling her quest to defend the rights of Indigenous people in Canada and Denmark, and fighting to establish an Indigenous forum at the European Union. But Alluna would also be given a window into Peter’s painful personal life, filled with tragedies and abuse. The resulting doc will open this year’s Hot Docs film festival in Toronto, where it is destined to start almost as many conversations as Alluna and Peter shared over the course of their shared journey.

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In a wide-ranging conversation, Alluna and two of her producers, Canadians Alethea Arnaquq-Baril and Stacey Aglok MacDonald, spoke with The Globe and Mail about the project’s genesis and goals.

Lin, there will naturally be questions about whether a white woman should direct a story about an Indigenous subject, who has spent her life fighting for Indigenous rights. What’s your perspective?

Lin Alluna: It was something that I was questioning throughout the film, and we’re continuously talking about my position of power and not having the same experience. Getting [Indigenous producer] Emile Hertling Péronard on board was important for me, and then we started to talk about who else might join.

Which is when Stacey and Alethea came on board, in 2019?

Aletha Arnaquq-Baril: Lin had been filming for a while by that time, and we first met her when I had Aaju over for dinner at my house one night and Lin just showed up with a camera. I was like, “Oh, who is this lady?” Aaju failed to mention that she was bringing someone with a camera over.

Stacey Aglok MacDonald: Aaju likes to keep us on our toes.

Arnaquq-Baril: Emile was familiar with my previous documentary work, including Angry Inuk, which featured Aaju. I had tried to make an intimate film about Aaju, but I struggled, so my film ended up being far more issue-based than a personal portrait. Another aspect to the dynamic was that I’ve known Aaju since I was a little girl and I looked up to her – there’s pressure that comes with knowing a kid who idolized you is making a film about you. So for a Danish woman to come along, there’s not that same pressure to be perfect in front of the camera.

MacDonald: Aaju was open about everything with Lin in a way that we’ve never seen before.

Arnaquq-Baril: We also felt a responsibility to make sure that it all didn’t go wrong.

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It’s unusual for a documentary to have its world premiere at Sundance, then go on to open not only another festival (the Copenhagen International Documentary Festival) but then another, at Hot Docs.

Arnaquq-Baril: It partly has to do with the fact that it’s confrontational in a way. It asks Canada and Denmark to consider their impacts on native people as colonizers, and so I think it’s appropriate that these two big doc festivals in these two countries show the film. More importantly, it’s really about Aaju as an individual, so there’s an organic way to see the impact of colonization on people.

There is a quote from one of the film’s reviews that stood out for me: that the film “hits and it hurts.” Lin, can you speak to your approach to capturing Aaju, her triumphs and tragedies?

Alluna: In the beginning, I was shy about filming situations that were very intense. But she kept saying to me, “Lin, you have to film this. It can’t just be my successes, you have to show the effects of colonization, too, which I’m dealing with in my life.”

Aaju is credited here as a co-writer, which is unusual. It reminded me of Laura Poitras’s film All the Beauty and the Bloodshed from last year about the photographer Nan Goldin, who also was deeply involved in the production of her own doc.

Alluna: We were always talking about why and when to shoot something. She was also watching footage from the rough cut stage.

Arnaquq-Baril: Stacey and I live in Iqaluit where we would watch footage with Aaju, but not many times because we didn’t want her to be retriggered by anything. But she does have very strong opinions on what was in the film and what wasn’t. The film is a celebration of her accomplishments but also a portrait of her personal life, which is a very fine line to walk given what kind of domestic violence is covered in the film. We wanted to protect her and make sure that she is safe and that the film doesn’t cause her more trouble.

Alluna: It is superscary to not have complete control over your film and complete agency as a director, but it was also the only thing that felt right.

MacDonald: More specifically in the case of Indigenous people, we’re so often not in charge of how we are represented or who is telling our stories. It’s important to give power back to whose story it is that’s being told.

Arnaquq-Baril: We’re also severely misrepresented. If this was a doc about, say, Elon Musk, I wouldn’t worry about whether or not to give him final cut.

Twice Colonized opens the 2023 Hot Docs film festival in Toronto on April 27, with additional screenings April 28 and May 1; the film opens for a week-long run at the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema starting May 12 (hotdocs.ca).

This interview has been condensed and edited.