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

A multidimensional image featuring a forest landscape covered by a purple spiral with a human bone at the center.

Trapped in museum archives, Ancestors bend time and space to find their way home, offering a revealing look the still-pervasive worldviews that justified collecting them in the first place.

In Aanikoobijigan [ancestor/great-grandparent/great-grandchild] — an experimental documentary directed by Adam and Zach Khalil (Ojibway) — history, spirituality, and the law collide as tribal repatriation specialists fight to return and rebury Indigenous human remains. The film documents the emotional and vital work of MACPRA (Michigan Anishinaabek Cultural Preservation and Repatriation Alliance). This alliance, made up of repatriation specialists representing all Michigan tribes, fights to bring their Ancestors and funerary objects home from settler colonial institutions like museums, libraries, and archives.

Winner of the Audience Award: NEXT at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, Adam and Zack Khalil’s monumental and formally daring film follows the pressing struggle to rebury Indigenous human remains that have been held in sterile storage, laying bare the history of Indigenous collections and the battle to enforce the laws intended to facilitate their repatriation to the communities they were originally stolen from.

Using an essayistic approach alongside vérité portraits, kaleidoscopic visual effects, and imaginative animations that encapsulate past, present, and future, Aanikoobijigan [ancestor/great-grandparent/great-grandchild] celebrates the courageous individuals who carry out this hard and emotionally draining labor of return.

Learn more in this 2026 article “Space and Time Aren’t Linear in “Aanikoobijigan [ancestor/great-grandparent/great-grandchild]” by Cecelia Santini.

Cosponsored by the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program.

Part of our “Experimental Lens” and “Doc Spots” series. Courtesy: The Film Collaborative.

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