Trapped in museum archives, Ancestors bend time and space to find their way home. History, spirituality, and the law collide as tribal repatriation specialists fight to return and rebury Indigenous human remains, offering a revealing look at the still-pervasive worldviews that justified collecting them in the first place.
The film Aanikoobijigan [ancestor/great-grandparent/great-grandchild] 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. 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 recognize and enforce the laws intended to facilitate their repatriation to the communities they were originally stolen from. Using an essayistic approach alongside vérité portraits, the film celebrates the courageous individuals who carry out this hard and emotionally draining labor of return.

—Sundance Film Festival

Aanikoobijigan [ancestor/great-grandparent/great-grandchild] directors Adam and Zack Khalil are members of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians. They are co-directors and co-editors of the feature documentary INAATE/SE/ [it shines a certain way. to a certain place./ it flies. falls./] (2016) which premiered as the closing night film of the Museum of Modern Art’s Doc Fortnight Film Festival, and the experimental documentary short The Violence of a Civilization without Secrets (2017) which premiered at Sundance. The Khalils are core contributors to New Red Order, a public-secret society which calls attraction toward indigeneity into question, yet promotes this desire, and enjoins potential non-Indigenous accomplices to participate in the co-examination and expansion of Indigenous agency.

Adam Khalil is an artist whose practice attempts to subvert traditional forms of image-making through humor, relation, and transgression. A co-founder of COUSINS Collective, Khalil’s work has been exhibited or screened at the Museum of Modern Art, Sundance Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Tate Modern, HKW, Walker Arts Center, Lincoln Center, Palais de Tokyo, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Creative Time, Toronto Biennial 2019, Whitney Biennial 2019, Sharjah Biennial 15, Counterpublic Triennial 2023, among other institutions. Khalil is the recipient of various fellowships and grants, including a 2021 Creative Capital Award, a 2020 Herb Alpert Award, a Jerome Artist Fellowship, the Gates Millennium Scholarship, and honors from Sundance Art of Nonfiction and Cinereach.

Zack Khalil is a filmmaker and artist whose work centers Indigenous narratives in the present—and looks towards the future—through the use of innovative nonfiction forms. Khalil also works professionally as a video editor, most recently co-editing Alison O’Daniels feature film The Tuba Thieves (2023), which premiered at Sundance. Khalil’s own work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, Sundance Film Festival, New York Film Festival, CPH: DOX, HKW, Walker Arts Center, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Creative Time, Toronto Biennial 2019, Whitney Biennial 2019, 59th Venice Biennale, Sharjah Biennial 15, and Counterpublic Triennial 2023, among other institutions and festivals. Khalil is the recipient of various fellowships and grants, including a Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, a Sundance Art of Nonfiction grant, and the Gates Millennium Scholarship.

Following the Penny Stamps Speaker Series screening of Aanikoobijigan at the Michigan Theater on October 12, a reception and Q&A will take place from 6:30-8:30 p.m. at Stamps Gallery (201 S. Division St.). Filmmakers Zack and Adam Khalil, with special guests, will speak in reflection on their film and process.

In partnership with the U-M Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act Office, U-M Museum of Anthropological Archeology, U-M Matthaei Botanical Gardens & Nichols Arboretum, U-M Department of Film, Television, and Media, the U-M Inclusive History Project, the U-M Department of Anthropology UM Museum Studies Program, and the U-M Stamps Gallery.

Series presenting partners: Detroit PBS, ALL ARTS, and PBS Books. Media partner: Michigan Public.