‘Dahomey’ Review: Mati Diop’s Audacious Doc Offers A Provocative View Of Modern Africa – Berlin Film Festival
18.02.2024 - 17:30
/ deadline.com
Somebody — or something — is speaking from inside a timber crate. “It’s so dark in here… a night so deep and opaque” read the subtitles; the voice is speaking in Fon, the local language of the West African country that was once called Dahomey and is now Benin. As the slats are nailed down, the voice is increasingly muffled; we are outside, but we are inside too, watching the light disappear.
This is the transport that will take a carved statue of Behanzin, king of Dahomey when the French army invaded in 1890, from the Musee Branly in Paris to Porto-Novo, capital of Benin. Around 7,000 works were looted from Benin in the years following the French conquest; in 2020, the French government ratified an earlier promise by President Macron to return 26 of them. Behanzin’s image, with its metal belt and bracelets and one arm raised in a warrior’s challenge, was on its way home.
Dahomey is French-Senegalese film-maker Mati Diop’s response to this event. It is a heady mix of sometimes contradictory approaches: a documentary record showing the process of packing, sending and displaying artefacts; an architectural essay on the light and space Diop finds in galleries at both ends of the journey; a political polemic featuring students arguing with some fury about what, if anything, the restitution signifies and, riskiest of all, the fantasy of a statue come to stiff, woody life.
His texts, written by Makenzy Orcel, range from the vagueness of an oracle to the poignantly immediate. “I am afraid of not being recognised and of not recognising anyone,” he says at one point; it is the fear felt by all returning expatriates. It is also the fear of the time traveller. Through Diop’s eyes, we see that the gleaming white corridors of
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