Hot Docs 2026: Aanikoobijigan Review

This will be one of many reviews during this year’s Hot Docs Film Festival, to keep up with our latest coverage, click here.

Museums are institutions considered to be sacred deposits of history. They gather items from centuries, such as paintings, sculptures, artifacts, and human remains, and through the tireless work of curators, display exhibits designed to provide patrons a wider comprehension and understanding of human history. In this sense, European intellectual elite organizes the canon of humanity, featuring, from the White perspective, what they consider as the most fundamental elements of the history. That being said, in recent years, there have been new currents in artistic study that have began to disrupt that Eurocentric methodology, leading to multiple reorganizations and reappraisals of artifacts. Directors Adam and Zack Khalil approach this theme under the indigenous umbrella in their new documentary, Aanikoobijigan [ancestor/great-grandparent/great-grandchild] (or Ancestor).

Aanikoobijigan follows the request of indigenous tribes to reclaim the remains of their ancestors, most of which can be found in dusty boxes in museum archives. From there, the film expands on the problems of the owning of such artifacts, being treated as items, rather than as the remains of human beings. The Khalil brothers address the core of the issue, the possession of ancestral entities by White elites. Similar to what director Mati Diop tackles in 2024’s ‘Dahomey’, her Golden Bear winning documentary on the repatriation of Dahomeyan religious artifacts to Benin, also explores the theme of reclaiming one’s history. Contrary to the former, which focuses on the trajectory and the discussions of the arrivals, the Khalils’ film accompanies that trajectory until they achieved their goal.

Despite its short runtime, the film focuses heavily on the treatment of those remains as simple items. Instead, they are ancestors and entities that belong to their population, almost like kidnapped individuals. Hence, there is a fascinating aspect of the frontality of their requests; the population demands the return of their ancestors because they belong to them. Yet, museums still own and control the remains, exposing them in the fancy rooms that welcome millions and millions of visitors each year. In other words, the directors do not develop how the ownership of those items generates profit for museums, which charge for entrance, and receive millions in donations from wealthy donors.

Still, the most crucial exposition in the film is the ownership of hundreds of skulls by a White collector who used to dig into sacred land, and those remains. According to the argument made by the Khalil brothers, there is a popular imaginary of finding ancestors through digging, particularly in popular works like ‘Poltergeist.’ For so long, there has been a construction of an imagery of the common property of those remains, solely by digging them up, exactly like characters from those aforementioned horror films. Above all else, there is so much to unveil from the racist perception of artistry, and the place of the remains as property and a profit item, instead as a crucial element to the upcoming generations of indigenous people.

Aanikoobijigan [ancestor/great-grandparent/great-grandchild] teases in its title the connections between the remains and the generations they belong to. There have been cycles of individuals without their ancestors, but slowly, those kidnapped are returning home.

still courtesy of Hot Docs

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Pedro Lima

Brazilian film writer. He is also a producer and executive producer for Zariah Filmes. Member of the International Film Society Critics Association (IFSCA), International Documentary Association (IDA), and Gotham and Media Film Institute.