Tickets
When
Sat 27 Dec 2025 - Sat 3 Jan 2026
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A stolen statue returns home in Mati Diop’s sophisticated, Berlinale Golden Bear-winning meditation on cultural memory and colonial legacy.
In 2021, 26 royal treasures looted by French colonial forces were returned to present-day Benin – a tiny fraction of the more than 7,000 works plundered from the former West African Kingdom of Dahomey.
In Dahomey, French-Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop (Atlantics) follows the artefacts’ journey from Paris’ Musée du Quai Branly back to West Africa, using their homecoming to explore the aftershocks of colonial history, the politics of restitution and the uneasy transformation of sacred objects into museum pieces.
At a lean 68 minutes, the Berlinale Golden Bear-winning Dahomey manages to be both meditative and innovative. As the artefacts at the film’s centre return home like the remains of fallen soldiers, Diop resists overt editorialising, instead channelling a chorus of Beninese voices – including the anthropomorphised narration of one of the objects – to immerse us in the complexities of colonial plunder and the politics of repatriation. The result is a work of radical restraint: a political essay and a cinematic act of reclamation.
"The film takes on a dreamy quality that puts the immediate debates in cultural and temporal perspective."
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