Diop’s latest documentary film is a poetic witnessing of the contradictions, mediations and politics of cultural restitution.Mubi
Dahomey
Directed by Mati Diop
Written by Mati Diop, Malkenzy Orcel
Starring Gildas Adannou, Morias Agbessi, Maryline Agbossi
Critic’s Pick
Winner of the prestigious Golden Bear prize at this year’s Berlinale, French auteur Mati Diop’s sophomore feature, Dahomey, is a film that invites questioning. Following the repatriation of 26 royal treasures stolen by French colonial troops in 1892 from their origins in the Kingdom of Dahomey, Diop’s latest documentary film is a poetic witnessing of the contradictions, mediations and politics of cultural restitution.
A key regional state in the 18th and 19th centuries, the Kingdom of Dahomey’s borders existed within present-day Benin and were a cultural nexus of trade and diplomatic relations, particularly with colonial European powers. Annexed into French West Africa in 1894 following the Second Franco-Dahomean War, the then-designated French Dahomey gained independence in 1960, later renaming itself as Benin in 1975.
Of the thousands of cultural objects looted by France from the Kingdom of Dahomey following its fall, only 26 were earmarked for return to Benin in 2021. Held in a collection of more than 4,000 Dahomean treasures by Paris’s Musée du Quai Branly, a leading public institution that specializes in the collection and display of art and culture of Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas, Diop’s Dahomey traces the spaces and labour that facilitate these artifacts’ return home.
There is a beautiful formal elegance to Diop’s film – the director’s camera eye is contemplative but critical, documenting the ways in which the environments that the 26 objects move through are stratified by class and capital — a reality that underscores the positioning of those people and things who are meant to submit to surveillance and those who are in a position to surveil. Art movers and handlers are directed by curators and conservators to pack, ship, receive and unpack these objects in spaces bound off from the public by museum attendants and security workers. It’s a wholly effective testimony to the labour of repatriation that is patterned by a striking, oftentimes mystical score by Dean Blunt and Wally Badarou.
Narrated in native Fon by the surreal and disembodied voice of an anthropo-zoomorphic royal statue representing King Ghezo (who served as King of Dahomey from 1818 to 1848), Dahomey shapes its world by intertwining its documentation of the realities of cultural restitution (from the process of moving the objects through space and time through to their reception in their home territory), alongside its lyrical witnessing of contemporary Beninese life and its transformative approach to representing these objects’ interior lives.
Much like its human counterparts stolen from their lands, this narrator is restless and uncertain, caught in a hypnagogic state between past and present, at one of many impactful moments, sharing with us: “I am torn between the fear of not recognizing anyone and of not being recognized.” It’s a history and subjectivity familiar to those of the African diaspora and their descendants.
Notably, when the objects are assessed upon their return to Cotonou by the Beninese curatorial team, several of the treasures are noted to have cracks and other damage and defects, as well as missing crucial parts of their forms. Yes, they have returned home, but not without cost.
This cost is one that is the subject of spirited debate by students and teachers of the Université d’Abomey -Calavi upon the arrival of the treasures and subsequent display at Cotonou’s Museum of the Marina. Received with lavish praise by Beninese officials, Diop’s lean documentation of the town-hall-style debate offers a welcome counter to the opulent celebration of these objects’ return by the state, platforming crucial questions regarding reparations, restitution and identity in postcolonial West Africa.
It’s a moment of urgent conversation and mixed reception that underscores the realities of an act of restitution that may be more symbolic than politically material and, crucially, questions the politics at work not just in the multipartite process of cultural return, but in the language, exhibition and barriers to access that envelop the histories of these objects and others like them.
The observation of these tides of complementary and contradictory ideas is undertaken tenderly by Diop, who allows the social and political multitudes of this moment to bend and stretch as they need. While brief in its runtime, Dahomey is dense with such intricacies as it privileges the subjective and communal over objective official histories, asking: What does it mean to return? Who benefits from return? And, importantly, who has the power to initiate return?
The Beninese recovery of these treasures is an unveiling in several ways and Diop is a welcome and precise observer of these entanglements, holding space for the spectres of displacement and the ancestral unrest that continue to haunt our present. With Dahomey, the filmmaker has wed her hypnotic style with the urgency demanded of documentary, often undoing its conventional structures through her decolonial approach to form and narrative.
A welcome companion to the rich textures and spirits of Diop’s lauded feature film, Atlantics, Dahomey offers itself as a site of essential reflection and a necessary reminder of the living poetics that cinema is capable of.
In the interest of consistency across all critics’ reviews, The Globe has eliminated its star-rating system in film and theatre to align with coverage of music, books, visual arts and dance. Instead, works of excellence will be noted with a critic’s pick designation across all coverage. (Television reviews, typically based on an incomplete season, are exempt.)