In 2021, the French government returned twenty-six royal treasures, out of the estimated seven thousand, that were looted in the 19th century by the French army in the Kingdom of Dahomey, corresponding to today’s Benin. In Dahomey, director Mati Diop documents the repatriation of part of that heritage. She does so by adopting a perspective as unusual as effective, namely that of the bronze itself, of King Ghezo (1818-1858). In this concise artumentary, imagination, and documentation are combined without ever becoming foreseeable. In Dahomey, the process of returning looted art is rendered in its complexity. Diop grasps the essence of such a delicate issue that, over the past few years, has been shaking museums and cultural institutions all across Europe, from Paris to Berlin. After winning the Grand Prix in Cannes in 2019 with her first narrative feature Atlantique, director Diop won the Golden Bear at the 74th Berlin Film Festival 2024 for Dahomey. This consecrates her in the firmament of French-African diasporic moviemakers, who elaborate on their roots and related traumas through their cinematic endeavors. Dahomey is yet another documentary that won the main prize at one of the major European film festivals. It confirms a trend that started last year, at Berlinale with the awarding of Sur l’Adamant by Nicolas Philibert and at Venice Film Festival where All the Beauty and The Bloodshed by Laura Poitras won the Golden Lion the following fall.
Dahomey starts in the dark and silent, yet deafening viscera of the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris. Ghezo is waiting to be shipped home, to the city of Cotonou, the economic capital of Benin. In a language that seems to come out of another world thanks to the distortive sound effects, Ghezo comes to life through the voice of the Haitian writer Makenzy Orcel. In Fon, a lingua Franca of West Africa, Ghezo explains his history and destiny. And so, from darkness, suddenly light it is. The spectator is catapulted into the overlit rooms of the museum. There the Beninese historian Bertin Calixte Biah and his equipped are examining the looted art. With scrutiny and peril, they take pictures and document the eventual damages, before packaging them ready to be shipped across the ocean. The twenty-six objects, among them thrones, arms, and doors of different materials, look like delicate patients in the knowledgeable hands of the medical team. Under the lens of DP Joséphine Drouin-Viallard, those objects come alive. They are the real protagonists of this odyssey, which lasted over three centuries and across two continents.
In the second part of Dahomey, the heroes come home. The twenty-six treasures are celebrated and welcomed back as the prodigal sons of Benin. A surprised, yet thrilled, motherland that had given up hopes over the last centuries of waiting. Like every respectable hero, Ghezo and the other treasures parade through cities and villages escorted by presidential guards, they are acclaimed by dancing and singing Beninese gathering in squares, and they are announced in banners and newspapers. For a while, the odyssey turns into a sort of road movie, giving the spectators a taste of what has yet to come. The suspense is so well rendered that for a moment the spectators are convinced to be watching a thriller unfolding in the third and last part of Dahomey. Only then the relevance of these twenty-six royal treasures is revealed through the words of the Beninese students of the University of Abomey-Calavi.
Gathered in a huge hall, young men wearing colorful dresses and women in jeans lively discuss the return of the objects. On the one hand, some admit having cried in front of such beauty, while other students declare not having been aware of the existence of such complex Beninese art. This makes them proud of their origins. On the other hand, more critical voices raise their discontent. To them, it’s ridiculous that only twenty-six out of over seven thousand objects have been returned. In this sequence, the only one that is more classically didactic and documentary-like, the liveliness of the discussion shies away from any possibility of boredom. Complex postcolonial themes such as belonging, identity, guilt, memory, exploitation, cultural appropriation, the use of indigenous languages, and inequality are touched upon in the students’ discussions. The attentive gaze, the fierce postures, and the authoritative opinions of those students make the spectator small and feel ignorant. But also guilty, for not having respected a millennial culture, but instead looted it and appropriated it. And this is the real change of paradigm in Dahomey: not only the treasures are returned to the Beninese people, but also power and dignity. An inversion of colonial asymmetries happens in front of the camera, in the movie Dahomey by Mati Diop.
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