Dahomey - English subtitled
Intellectually stimulating documentary about the return of looted African art treasures from France to the Republic of Benin. Is compensation for the wounds of the colonial past at all possible? Winner of the Golden Bear in Berlin.
For centuries, the Kingdom of Dahomey, within the borders of modern-day Benin, was a central cultural meeting point in West Africa, a site of European colonial conquest and the transatlantic slave trade. In 1892, the French invaded and looted hundreds of treasures from the royal palace. Following years of appeals and reports, in 2021 an agreement was made for several of these artworks to be returned from France to Benin.
French-Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop (ATLANTIQUE) was granted access to the process. Tracing the historic repatriation of 26 royal treasures from the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, through their crating, overseas shipping to Cotonou, condition assessment, and eventual unveiling, Diop reveals not only the logistical process with elegance and precision, but also summons the ghosts of displacement. Carried by the surreal, disembodied voice and restless spirit of a bronze itself, the film is at once lean and expansive, and provocatively gesturing towards unresolved histories of colonial expansion and exploitation (with which museums the world over are rife). As a gathering of young, cross-disciplinary Beninese students and teachers at the Université d’Abomey-Calavi fervently debate the arrival of the treasures, their impassioned arguments and ideas echo the film’s timely, political reckoning. (source: www.tiff.net)