Dahomey

As the restitution conversation gains momentum worldwide, this striking Berlinale Golden Bear–winning documentary follows a stolen statue home.

In 2021, the Musée du Quai Branly announced it would return a fraction of the antiquities held in its collection to the Republic of Benin, formerly known as the West African kingdom of Dahomey. Soon after hearing the news, French filmmaker Mati Diop (A Thousand Suns, MIFF 2014) and cinematographer Joséphine Drouin-Viallard were hot on their trail. The resulting film captures not just the forensic packing and transporting of these 26 artefacts, but also Beninese people interrogating the items’ significance to their culture, the country’s vestigial ties to France and the very purpose of museums – all woven together with narration by a Beninese king’s statue, long since forgotten in a warehouse, that yearns for home.

Artfully blending documentary and dramatisation, Diop’s follow-up to the Dakar-set ghost story Atlantics is a mesmerising treatise on belonging and self-determination. More than a mere cinematic ode to history and the painstaking exercise of archaeological preservation, Dahomey is a form-transcending account of those who tirelessly work to reconnect object to place in the face of belligerent institutions, and of a nation keen to emerge from the ruinous impact of colonisation.

“Diop’s strange, captivating and rigorously intellectual film leaves a mighty impression well beyond its compact length … A film as rich in ideas as any king’s treasure.” – Time Out