“I felt immediately an identification with the statues because the stigma of colonization is something that, in my own way, I have experienced and I’m still experiencing,” says Dahomey director Mati Diop. The statues to which Diop refers are 26 Beninese artifacts that were repatriated from France in 2021 after years on display in a museum. Dahomey observes the return of these pieces among the over 7,000 works stolen from the Kingdom of Dahomey amid the French invasion of 1892. The film, which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival this year, offers an experimental essay about the disconnect between culture and identity as a result of colonial displacement.
Diop, speaking with POV via Zoom ahead of the theatrical and MUBI release of Dahomey, says she could relate to the artifacts’ situation of straddling two worlds. “The return to the native land was something I felt very close to,” notes Diop, who was born in Paris and is of mixed French-Senegalese descent. “And the ambivalence of it, wondering what are they made of and which metamorphosis they’re going through, and if they’re going to be recognized there. These are questions that, as a mixed person, feel very close to my existential experience.”
The film articulates these existential questions through poetic voiceover by one of the statues. The artifact, known as “26” to represent its place in the catalogue of pieces returning to Dahomey, now known as Benin, boasts the likeness of King Ghézo, who ruled the kingdom from 1818 to 1859 and watched over the land through the figure in the afterlife. 26 speaks in the Dahomean language of Fon and articulates his poetic considerations through haunted vocalization, which uses voices both male and female mixed with metallic reverb. It’s an unsettling evocation of restless souls ill-at-ease without the statue safeguarding the kingdom. It’s also an artfully provocative conversation starter.
Diop explains that Dahomey evolved from an idea for a fiction film she was considering when news of the artifacts’ repatriation caught her eye. “The main character was going to be an African mask who was going to tell his own story of capture, exile, and return,” says Diop. “When the urgency of shooting Dahomey arrived, this idea of the voice of artifacts telling their own story was already there. It’s a restitution gesture to give them back their voices, their history, and their ability to become subjects and not only objects.”
One can’t help but observe parallels between Dahomey and Diop’s first feature, the acclaimed drama Atlantics (2019), which hauntingly traces the disappearances of migrant workers as they leave Dakar, Senegal, and cross the ocean with hopes of finding work elsewhere. Diop at first doesn’t quite agree when asked if she’s made another ghost story, but sees it as a metaphor for the ghosts of colonialism. “France still has colonial practices that are organized and concrete and happening,” she notes. “You can see it precisely happening in Guadeloupe and New Caledonia, and those are just a few examples. But there is also a spectral, colonial present that is more difficult to grasp. I needed to give it a form cinematographically in order to exercise it and grasp it. We can say it’s a ghost film because it has to do with how history is still very present, even invisibly, in the present.”
When 26 finally arrives home and settles along with the other artifacts in the Beninese city of Abomey, Dahomey observes how citizens deal with the ghosts of colonialism in the present. Diop presents a lengthy sequence that offers perspectives of Beninese youths during a student debate at the University of Abomey-Calavi. Students share experiences of being emotionally overwhelmed in the statues’ presence. Others express frustration over the number of artifacts returned home. 26 out of 7,000 is an insult, one man says, while another student advises peers that intangible elements of culture—like dance, poetry, and song—endured even when physical pieces of culture were stolen. Others ask why they’re debating art when the real tangible consequences of colonialism, like poverty and hunger, are felt by many people in Benin.
While this act of Dahomey looks like straightforward cinéma vérité, Diop admits that she provoked the debate to provide a necessary forum. “The intention at the core of this film was to give back the point of view of the artifacts and the point of view of a certain Beninese youth on the topic,” says Diop. The filmmaker sees the topic of restitution as inseparable from that of African youths, but was surprised by the absence of young voices in the conversation about repatriation.
“I realized that I never heard African youth talk about this, and it seemed like they were really not considered in the conversation,” she observes. “When I first started to hear about this precise restitution, it sounded like a conversation between two presidents: the French president and the Beninese president. I felt that it was really important that a film would bring other voices that are even more concerned by the question.”
While Diop assembled the students in the amphitheatre, the debate that follows in the agora-style setting voices opinions that are authentically their own. The director says she “cast” students with differing views and invited her assistant director Gildas Adannou, who is Beninese, to moderate the debate. “It’s a portrait of a historical moment, a portrait of this group of students, a portrait that is both very subjective, but also one that manages to provide restitution in a sense of spirit and state of mind,” observes Diop. “I wanted this portrait to feel like a work-in-progress conversation that would lead to a global debate.” Diop adds by “global debate,” she means that “agencies of the world that are in front of this conversation can take part in it” with cinema being a powerful tool with which to inspire the conversation.
Drawing upon the voices of statues and students alike, Diop’s film sits firmly in an oeuvre of decolonial cinema. “My films have always been precisely decolonial in the way that they were deconstructing colonial narratives but this time it was another challenge because the repatriation was very political,” says Diop. “The tricks to avoid were not only the colonial perspective, but also the African political instrumentalization from the Benin state. It was important to navigate through the very official political national narrative of Benin.” Diop admits that it was delicate navigating that balance as a French-Senegalese filmmaker observing Beninese culture. She says it was a case of bringing eyes both celebratory and critical to the story.
Of particular note, Diop says, is the matter of observing class divides in Benin. “This is why, in the film, there’s a big place given to the workers. The workers who were holding the crates and the workers who are doing the construction [of the new exhibit] in the presidential palace were both central to me and also completely erased from the events.” Dahomey offers an emphasis on labour as 26 and other artifacts are boxed up, transported, examined, catalogued, and re-installed.
“It was very complex to portray such multilayered events, which is historical, political, social. There is a very precise agenda and intention of the states,” adds Diop. “The balance between critique and celebration was very delicate. My own eye was ambivalent, too. I was never searching for answers, but only questions.”
