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Dahomey
$15 Special Event Tickets
France/Senegal/Benin , 2024, DCP, color, 68 min.
English and French with French subtitles.
DCP source: MUBI
A vital voice in contemporary art cinema, the French-Senegalese director Mati Diop (b. 1982) has spent much of her two-decade career exploring the fraught postcolonial relationship between Europe and North Africa. It’s an issue tied up in her identity as a mixed-race artist, but Diop’s cinema is arguably more poetic than it is expressly political, at least by the standards of those making work on similar topics—namely, the European migrant crisis, transnationalism and the slippery nature of cultural heritage, which her latest feature, Dahomey, nimbly traces across temporal and geographic lines alike.
Diop, who has said that she prefers to treat immigration not as a subject, but “as an individual and sensitive experience, as a kind of time travel,” set the conceptual course for this approach with her 2009 short Atlantiques, a hybrid work depicting a group of Senegalese teens as they contemplate the existential implications of illegally crossing the Atlantic for a chance at a better life. Following a run of increasingly ambitious medium-length films—including Snow Canon (2011), Big in Vietnam (2012), and Mille Soleils (2013), the latter a kind of spiritual sequel to her uncle Djibril Diop Mambéty’s 1973 classic Touki Bouki—Diop emerged with her first feature, Atlantics (2019), a return to the themes of the earlier, similarly named short and a metaphysical expansion of its central premise.
Dahomey, which won the Golden Bear at the 2024 Berlinale, concerns a different sort of time travel. Set in November 2021, the film follows the repatriation of Kingdom of Dahomey treasures from a museum in Paris to their original home in present-day Benin. But rather than simply document the process, Diop subtly and creatively dramatizes the journey. Playful but sharply conceived, Dahomey quietly forges a self-reflexive dialectic around notions of cultural and cinematic inheritance—ideas that animate the whole of Diop’s practice, yet here take on a historical resonance only suggested in her prior work. – Jordan Cronk
Mati Diop’s shapeshifting second feature finds the forty-two-year-old French-Senegalese filmmaker directly reckoning with the postcolonial concerns that have long haunted her dreamlike tales of multicultural identity and displacement. In November 2021, following a public repatriation campaign, twenty-six royal treasures from the Kingdom of Dahomey were returned from the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris to their original home in present-day Benin. Diop’s film documents these efforts through elegant footage of the artifacts being prepped, shipped and eventually redisplayed in Porto-Novo while simultaneously dramatizing the existential nature of the initiative by giving voice to one of the objects, a stone statue of King Béhanzin that speaks—in voiceover passages penned by the Haitian author Makenzy Orcel—of its memories of Africa and its fear of returning home. As in her first feature, Atlantics (2019), a quasi-supernatural romance set against the backdrop of the European migrant crises, Diop forges a temporal link between cultures via issues of inheritance, transnationalism and the ghosts of colonialism—matters that a lesser film would deem resolved but which here are complicated by an extended debate among students at the University of Abomey-Calavi about the value of restitution when thousands of similar holdings still reside in the Paris museum. Suggesting more in its slim sixty-seven minutes than most conventional documentaries manage in twice that length, Dahomey speaks powerfully to cinema’s capacity to both reanimate the past and illuminate the future.