![‘Aanikoobijigan’ Review: Adam & Zack Khalil Craft A Quietly Radical Documentary About Life, Death, Time, & Knowledge [Sundance]](https://cdn.theplaylist.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/31205023/Aanikoobijigan_ancestor_great_grandparent_great_grandchild-Still_1-Sundance.jpg "‘Aanikoobijigan’ Review: Adam & Zack Khalil Craft A Quietly Radical Documentary About Life, Death, Time, & Knowledge [Sundance]")
“Aanikoobijigan [ancestor/great-grandparent/great-grandchild],” the thoughtful and quietly radical new documentary from Ojibwe filmmakers Adam and Zack Khalil, which recently won the NEXT Audience Award at Sundance, is about a great many things.
It’s about life just as it is death, theft as much as it is restoration, and history just as much as it is our current moment. It’s about the ways the past, present, and future are interconnected, challenging us to look more deeply at their relationship, serving as an act of often revolutionary reframing of how we think about time and knowledge. In the same breath as it asks more urgent foundational questions and engages in pointed, poetic formal experimentation, it also proves to be a clear-eyed confrontation with why it is that tribal repatriation specialists must currently work to recover Indigenous human remains that were taken and locked away in libraries, museums, and archives. Piece by piece, the film becomes a portrait of quiet, ordinary courage, just as it doesn’t shy away from pondering why the dedication and years of fighting an uphill battle like this were required in the first place.
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Specifically, the documentary isn’t afraid to ask more critical questions that get at the foundations of knowledge, history, and who in America gets to “own” these ideas. While museums like to position themselves as places of preservation and respect for history, if they have stolen Indigenous human remains, are they any different from a grave robber? When museums deny requests from people who want to bury their ancestors, is this not just an extension of a violent colonial project and an institution continuing to recreate historical harm?
As the Khalil Brothers take us through all these questions, interviewing a wide array of scholars and community members, they hold up the country’s cruel justifications for their thefts to the light. Engaging in incisive analysis of the supposedly scientific justifications for this theft, it offers an intriguing critique of cinema and popular culture using the trope of Indigenous burial sites, and it’s riveting, unflinching documentary filmmaking that already feels like an essential text.
Primarily shot with a compassionate eye by the Khalil Brothers while also boasting additional cinematography by Sky Hopinka, Jacque Clark, Shaandiin Tome, Bayley Sweitzer, and Samuli Haavisto, it follows the Michigan Anishinaabek Cultural Preservation and Repatriation Alliance (MACPRA) as they spend years fighting the battle for the return of their ancestors’ remains. Though they’ve been successful in recovering thousands of remains, thousands more remain, and the fight must continue. Even as it’s a film that’s frequently more conventionally constructed in how it takes us through this fight, using archival photos, footage, and talking-head interviews, there are also many more ambitious moments where we step away from this.
Namely, some of the most exciting and effective sequences are those in which we experience evocative visual reflections on time and history. One moment where we hear narration about infinite recurrence and see a magnificent montage of the natural world is exhilarating, leaping into something more cinematically powerful that brings the film’s ideas to life more fully than mere words ever could. It’s a work that’s certainly built to be accessible to all audiences. Still, it’s these moments that show the filmmakers are also unafraid to gently push us into fleeting sequences that are more boldly experimental once they have us in the door.
While the institutions that stole ancestral remains were built on dehumanizing Indigenous people to justify these thefts, Aanikoobijigan is a refreshing, radical rejection of this, finding its own pathways of knowledge and vital life that reveal how there can, and must, be another way. The film shows how the supposed knowledge we often accept as “objectively” true is usually built on ideologies and concepts of superiority that need to be questioned. There is no objective “view from nowhere,” and deeper questions need to be asked about historical preconceptions.
Not only does Aanikoobijigan ask these questions in illuminating fashion, but it also finds a vibrant, radical humanity in a world that could use much more of it. It’s a film about death, yes, but also about the life that echoes through the past, present, and future. The fight continues, but it’s in films and art like this where life continues to endure. [B+]
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