Aanikoobijigan [ancestor / great-grandparent / great-grandchild]

Adam Khalil & Zack Khalil / United States / 2026 / European Premiere / 81 min

The battle for the earthly remains of Indigenous peoples is both bureaucratic and spiritual in a highly topical film by two members of the New Red Order artist collective.

All over the world activists are fighting for their ancestors. For Indigenous peoples this often means confronting the fact that ancestral remains are still held in museum university and research collections instead of returned to the soil from which they came. In Michigan, the MACPRA association (Michigan Anishinaabek Cultural Preservation and Repatriation Alliance) consists of members from a number of Indigenous tribes who have united in the bureaucratic battle for human remains, funerary objects and cultural belongings.

History, spirituality and law collide in a film that follows specialists and activists in their work for repatriation, while at the same time casting a critical eye on the structures that made it possible to collect and store human remains in the first place. Interviews and fieldwork alternate with spiritual sequences of a hallucinatory and almost cosmic visual power. Directors (and brothers) Adam and Zach Khalil are part of the artist collective New Red Order, which was behind the major exhibition at the festival’s centre, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, during CPH:DOX 2022.