London Film Festival 2024 – Dahomey ★★★★

Released: 25 October 2024

Director: Mati Diop

Reviewed By: Avanish Chandrasekaran

French-Senegalese filmmaker and actress Mati Diop comes from a rich artistic lineage. Born in Paris to famed musician Wasis Diop and French art patron Christine Brossard, she is also the niece of Djibril Diop Mambéty, the director of the Senegalese cinematic landmark Touki Bouki (1973). Thus, she is uniquely poised to reflect on the relationship Africans have with both their cultural roots and colonial past. She attempts to do so in her latest offering Dahomey, which won the Golden Bear at the 2024 Berlin Film Festival. At just 68 minutes, the film is a lean, engaging mood piece about present-day Benin attempting to reconnect with its cultural history, following the restitution of 26 stolen sculptural artefacts by France in 2021. Benin, formerly known as Dahomey, was a French colony from 1894 to 1958.

Atlantics (2019), Diop’s directorial debut, saw her blending documentary and fiction and weaving in elements of fantasy to tell the story of Senegalese youths dealing with harsh socio-political realities at home and attempting perilous sea voyages to Europe in a bid for a better life. In Dahomey, her treatment of the subject follows a similar strain. Diop paints a psychological portrait of erstwhile Dahomey and its rulers by giving a brooding, internal voice to one statue of King Ghezo, who reigned from 1818 to 1858. The statue is designated as item number 26, the last item to be shipped off to Benin. The voice of King Ghezo, written and voiced by writer Makenzy Orcel, contemplates his physical and cultural displacement, wondering as to where he is being shipped off to and where he stands in the larger history of his homeland. The tone of the voice plays to the supernatural qualities usually associated with such statues, but Diop’s utilisation of it to reflect on the statues’ predicament humanises the historical figures they represent. It also humanises a history and a culture on the brink of obscurity in its own homeland.

Diop has her cinematographer Joséphine Drouin-Viallard devote several frames —including some from wonderful point-of-view angles—  to the packing and crating of the artefacts. The packing of Ghezo’s statue is staged like a reverse funeral of sorts. Deemed a curiosity piece by the French colonisers who stole it, the statue is draped and nailed into a crate in France, akin to how a mortician embalms and prepares a body for burial in a coffin. It is unveiled and reborn into a new life in Benin, where it becomes an important fixture in the nation’s cultural discourse.

Unsurprisingly, the return of the artefacts is celebrated as a national event in Benin. Dancers and singers welcome convoys of trucks carrying the statues entering the Palais de la Marina in Cotonou, where they would be housed for a temporary public exhibition. Diop is very atmospheric in her approach to capturing the vibe of people and places, be it the working space of a French museum or a Beninese city vibrant with activity. Her gaze at the artefacts is more clinical than aesthetic, when she records their specifics and levels of oxidisation they have undergone being read out by a curator, serving to highlight the temporal length of their displacement. She is more interested in their importance and value within the broader context of African history and culture. Therefore, she devotes the latter part of the film to an impassioned debate among Beninese college youth about the restitution. We see a broad spectrum of viewpoints being expressed. One young man laments how he was familiar with Western culture via Disney and Tom & Jerry, and yet did not see stories of figures like King Béhanzin being represented in animation, which would have enabled him to connect with his own culture. To the sound of condescending jitters, a young woman reveals how she wept at the sight of the statues for 15 minutes, while another student reveals feeling absolutely nothing! Some criticise the restitution as a political move made to boost the images of the French and Beninese heads of states. Others deem it an insult to call the act an event. One eloquent young man sees the restitution as “a materialisation of previous revolts” led by Africans against colonial powers. The conversation moves beyond the statues and into the state of modern Benin, wherein most of the population still lacks appropriate purchasing power and accessibility to appreciate works of art at museums, and that it still experiences colonial hangover vis-à-vis the prevalence of the French language over national languages like Fon. The debate sees illuminating moments wherein speakers regularly switch between French and Fon to express themselves more clearly. Some also express feelings about the future, like the work yet to be done to retrieve thousands of artefacts from other nations, and the need to keep them in the consciousness so that future generations can appreciate them and carry the legacy forward.

To crudely use an action movie metaphor, the debate in Dahomey is a crucial climactic set piece. An action set piece assumes its stature based not just on the action being shown, but on the story and sentiment fuelling the action. Similarly, the debate here is impactful not simply because of the eloquence with which the views are being expressed, but due to the emotions causing the formulations of such views. While it provides a snapshot of contemporary Benin, it also becomes an important meeting point between the past and the present of a nation that has undergone the trauma of colonial exploitation. Showing a new generation grappling with the trauma of their nation’s history and yet appreciating the beauty of what has been restituted and what they still possess, namely their “immaterial heritage”, as one student puts it, like dances and customs. Dahomey is thus a potent document about a nation at a moment in time, and has assured a place for itself in African and world cinema.