Dahomey is only 68 minutes long, but in that stretch of time, it crosses continents, considers the ongoing effects of colonialism from multiple angles, and moves from the metaphysical to the mundane. Mati Diop’s second feature film shares elements, interests, and a distinctive restlessness with her 2019 debut Atlantics, though it falls, however unconventionally, within the realm of documentary. It’s only appropriate that a filmmaker so focused on interrogating how little borderlines actually circumscribe the people, history, and cultures they are meant to contain would herself make a work that can’t easily be summed up within one genre. Dahomey is nonfiction, observing the November 2022 return of 26 royal artifacts that were looted from the Kingdom of Dahomey by the French in 1892 and that are being repatriated to the present-day country of Benin. But among the voices included in the film, which range from curator Calixte Biah to a collection of students who debate the significance of the restored items, is one belonging to the treasures themselves. In lines spoken by Haitian writer Makenzy Orcel, they speak lyrically about their time in exile and in the darkness of foreign museums. “There are thousands of us in this night. We all bear the same scars, uprooted, ripped out, the spoils of massive plundering,” they say. “I’m torn between the fear of not being recognized by anyone and not recognizing anything.” This choice adds a dreamlike touch to a film otherwise about the brutal realities of not-so-distant acts of rapacious imperialism and a present day in which the West is still able to dictate the terms with which it reckons with the past.
Dahomey is a more expansive film than Atlantics, a supernatural romance set in a Dakar where desperate young men can only see a better future for themselves across the ocean in Spain. But it’s also more aloof, a compact creation that advances itself like a dense, avant-garde essay onscreen. The camera, almost always still, captures odd moments of humanity, whether that’s a guard noodling on their phone while walking the grounds of the Palais de la Marina in Cotonou at night or a student dozing off during the discussion section. Dahomey has bigger concerns, too, which make it a headier and more abstract work to contend with, even as Diop shows off her ability to find poetry in the faces of the people, first workers, then grandees, then members of the public, who come to see the artworks in their new-old home. The film functions on its most basic level as a testament to the ability of the Beninese to properly care for the artifacts, an argument that has been used as justification for withholding their return and one that is refuted with every shot of the Beninese curators receiving the boxes, carefully unpacking their contents, cataloguing the items and their condition, and, finally, putting them on display. The 26 artworks are a mere fraction of the thousands that were plundered and have yet to be repatriated, but their return is still greeted with celebrations in the street and front-page coverage in the newspaper.
I loved Atlantics, whereas, after two viewings, Dahomey remains a work that I like less while admiring its ambition more. Key to that experience is the sequence that fills much of the final third of the film, in which University of Abomey-Calavi students participate in a forum about what the return of the artifacts means to them. As someone who is sensitive to a fault about didacticism, the very existence of this segment had me on edge. But the discussion is lively, wide-ranging, and rarely in accordance with any particular point. One young man says that he feels nothing about the items, while another confesses, to some jeers from the audience, to crying at the sight of them and being in awe of the ingenuity of their ancestors. Some see the paltry number of artifacts returned as an inherent insult, while others protest that the immaterial aspects of their cultural past were never lost and shouldn’t be discounted. There’s talk about the repatriation as a gesture meant to boost the image of France, or as a political act on the part of Beninese president Patrice Talon, who, as one student points out, is the descendant of interpreters who helped allow the thefts to happen in the first place. If the rest of the film takes a somber, poetic perspective on the symbolic and literal nature of this partial restoration of a lost heritage, its youth represents a bold, discordant, and exciting counterpoint — vital and engaged, looking toward a future they demand be better than the past.