French-Senagelese director Mati Diop's documentary DAHOMEY comes to the London Film Festival feted with the Berlin Golden Bear. It's a relatively short film at around 70 minutes and alternates between spiritual fantasy and cold hard political debate. The resulting film is austere, provocative and urgent.
The movie opens in a French museum where pandemic-era masked curators are packing 26 artefacts originally looted from Benin by French colonists. Among them is "number 26" - the statue of a powerful nineteenth century king - who in an eery voiceover bristles that these men do not know his name. We follow the camera inside the packing crates as lids are sealed shut and screws drilled in. We hear the engines of the airplane hum. And then we see the unboxing in Benin and the processional route of these artefacts to their new home.
As Mati Drop made clear in her post-film Q&A, it is ambiguous how far the cheering crowds and singing women are genuinely excited to see the return of these artefacts or whether this is a staged "Mise En Scene" courtesy of the President. And this neatly brings us to the latter half of the film where we hear university students debate the meaning of the artefacts' return.
Should they be grateful that their President and France's President Macron did a deal? Or should they remain angry that only 26 out of 7000 artefacts have come back? Should they see this as an historical occasion or a political act, designed to shore up the popularity of both presidents? In one of the most incisive comments we hear a young woman describe her frustration that the entire debate is being carried out in French, rather than Fon or any of the other native languages, because Beninese youth are only taught French in school. Another young woman asks what resources will be made available so that the children in rural areas can come to the capital and see these artefacts, learn about their history and feel pride in it.
As the movie closes we are on the streets of the capital, with Diop's camera calmly moving among the street-sellers and bars, much as the movie opened hovering over trinket-sellers by the Eiffel Tower. The camera lingers on a poster advertising a skin-whitening cream - another legacy of learned and imbibed racism. And then we close the film but not the debate.
I found this to be deeply provocative and layered. It spoke to what the return of these looted objects means to their home countries - and made me consider the role of our own great historical collections. And in all the editorials I have read about the return of the Benin Bronzes, this film is sadly unique in centring young African voices.
DAHOMEY has a running time of 68 minutes. It won the Golden Bear at Berlin 2024. It goes on release in the USA and UK on October 25th.
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