Peter is ever more weary of having to meet her colonizers more than halfway: Even speaking Danish, she admits, pains her, and there’s a backstory to this resentment that also explains the film’s title. (The film sets up a thorny conflict between animal right activists condemning seal hunting as outmoded cruelty, and Indigenous people who view it simply as a way of survival.) She’s used to the implication that any concessions to modernity are hypocritical for someone campaigning for the protection of Indigenous culture and community, as if the goal is to preserve those in amber, rather than to let them function in the 21st century. “We want to be part of this industrialized modern world,” Peter explains at one point, “but we want it from our perspective, not the way it is imposed on us.” She addresses this to a well-meaning Danish journalist whom she nonetheless calls out for noting her “urban, western” appearance, notwithstanding the traditional Inuit tattoos on her face. As such, the film, which premiered in January at Sundance, has since served as a politically pointed opener at both Canada’s Hot Docs festival and CPH:DOX in Denmark further festival berths await, while specialist doc distributors should respond to its mix of the inspiring and the idiosyncratic. 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. 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.

Cross dj review