HotDocs Review: Gregor Brändli’s Elephants and Squirrels

Gregor Brändli’s HotDocs documentary film Elephants and Squirrels explores the repatriation of Sri Lankan artifacts from a Swiss museum — and how Sri Lankan artist Deneth Piumakshi Veda grapples with the issue in her work.

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In the last few years, there’s been a boom in documentaries about the many artifacts colonial powers removed from their colonies, often for their museums — and the recent attempts that have been made to repatriate these stolen objects. In Homecoming (2023), Suvi West and Anssi Kömi documented the return of Sámi artifacts long held in a museum to their homeland. In Dahomey (2024), Mati Diop personified one of the sculptures being returned to Benin from a French museum. His disembodied voice speaks to the audience and tells us his history — as he gets packed up to be shipped back home. And the TV series Stuff the British Stole, looks at how Britain pilfered artifacts and documents from its colonies around the world — some in museums, and some hidden away entirely.

At this year’s HotDocs festival, two films take on the subject of repatriation of artifacts: Aanikoobijigan [ancestor/great-grandparent/great-grandchild] about the Michigan Anishinaabek Cultural Preservation and Repatriation Alliance; and Elephants and Squirrels about repatriating Sri Lankan artifacts that have been held in a Swiss museum. 

Elephants and Squirrels: on repatriation from museums that don’t respresent a colonial power

All of these documentaries, save Elephants and Squirrels, have been about artifacts stolen by the colonial powers in that region. As director Gregor Brändli put it, Elephants and Squirrels poses a slightly different question: “What role did neutral Switzerland play in colonialism, and how long can it hide behind the narrative that it merely had trade relations?” The film gets its title from two famous artifacts that Swiss naturalists Paul and Fritz Sarasin brought to Basel from Sri Lanka in the 20th century.

To answer this question, Brändli teams up with Sri Lankan artist Deneth Piumakshi Veda who has been actively involved in trying to get these items repatriated — and whose own artworks ask us to consider why it’s disturbing to house stolen human remains in a museum. The film cuts between Veda’s own journey through Sri Lanka — following the same path as the Sarasins — and the museum archives and meeting rooms where artifacts are examined in sterile rooms and museum officials discuss the challenges of repatriation. 

Early in the film, we see Veda visiting the museum’s archives and trying on a Sri Lankan mask in an all-white room. Only the curator places a cotton sack on her head so that her skin doesn’t touch or damage the artifact — an effective image to show how the museum preserves the artifacts by keeping them at arm’s length from the people they mean the most to. It’s also a strong contrast to the lush, green Sri Lankan landscapes that Veda travels through.

The horror of human remains in the museum

Veda later visits the archives to look at some of the human remains — with a researcher who explains the purpose of bringing back these bones was for eugenics research. The Sarasins, reflecting racist pseudoscientific beliefs common among European scientists at the time, believed that Sri Lankan people represented a supposed ‘missing link’ between white Europeans and apes.

The most striking sequence in the film is when Veda unboxes her sculptures for display in a museum. They are lifesize sculptures of her — the woman we’ve been following throughout the film. It’s deeply unsettling — an effective way to collapse the distance between museum artifacts from another era and the body of a living person we’ve come to know throughout the film. As she presents her work, she reads out a speech in which every line begins with “Our bodies” and ends with how those bodies were exploited by European powers. 

Thoughtful choices in Gregor Brändli’s direction of Elephants and Squirrels

There are lovely choices along the way to emphasize both the power of these institutions and the problems with them. Early in the film, Brändli interviews a top museum official about repatriation. As he talks about the challenges of this — of verifying how the objects belong to and releasing them — Brändli shoots him from afar where his tall bookshelves and large office seem to dwarf him. It’s unclear how sympathetic he is to repatriation and how much he’s speaking in PR speak that helps him to avoid committing to one thing or another. 

We hear similar refrains from other museum officials, from curators to archivists, who appear constrained by institutional systems and protocols, even as the film questions the ethics of those systems themselves. But it also forces us to question the ethics of these archives and who is responsible for righting these historical wrongs. By placing her own body within the visual language of museum display, Veda turns repatriation from an abstract institutional debate into something intimate, contemporary, and impossible to look away from.

The film is less compelling when it shifts away from Veda in the second half and into lengthy institutional discussions about the practical work of repatriation. These scenes broaden the scope beyond a single activist’s perspective, and delve into the bureaucratic challenges of repatriation — even when the actors involved are sympathetic to the cause. But with a two-hour runtime, this begins to feel shaggy, and takes us away from what made the film most powerful: how  it connects the museum archive to Veda’s artistic practice, showing not just a campaign for repatriation, but an artist actively grappling with how to make the violence of colonial display visible to contemporary audiences.