Dahomey review – a blue­print for anti-colo­nial­ist action

Split­ting her work­ing hours between act­ing and film­mak­ing, Mati Diop is a rare bird: a won­der­ful, intu­itive and sub­tle screen per­former who is also an incred­i­ble direc­tor and writer. Hav­ing cul­ti­vat­ed her rep­u­ta­tion via a series of right­ly laud­ed short works, her fea­ture debut, Atlantics, played in the com­pe­ti­tion at the Cannes Film Fes­ti­val in 2019 and is now con­sid­ered (again, right­ly) to be one of the finest films of that decade.

She returns behind the cam­era for the extra­or­di­nary and light­ly eccen­tric short non-fic­tion piece, Dahomey, some­thing a lit­tle dif­fer­ent for­mal­ly but in many ways a com­pan­ion pieces to Atlantics in that is, at its roots, about how things and peo­ple change when they move or are trans­plant­ed to for­eign climes. Her lean, but extra­or­di­nar­i­ly detailed and care­ful­ly edit­ed 67-minute film chron­i­cles the return of 26 roy­al trea­sures to the king­dom of Dahomey in Benin that were plun­dered by French colonialists.

The film offers an implic­it cri­tique of muse­ums as sites of inher­ent colo­nial cel­e­bra­tion, but also stress­es their impor­tance when it comes to mat­ters of edu­ca­tion and dis­sem­i­nat­ing nation­al his­to­ry and, by exten­sion, a sense of civic pride. One of the many the­o­ries pre­sent­ed here, via a live­ly pan­el dis­cus­sion by stu­dents of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Abomey-Calavi, is that work­ing class oppres­sion and low wages are the ene­my of art and cul­ture, and that the­o­ret­i­cal­ly they could and should oper­ate with a more hand-in-glove approach.

But this is the mere tip of the ice­berg when it comes to the rel­e­vance of this high­ly-sym­bol­ic jour­ney, and the film avoids polemic and instead presents itself as informed and inquis­i­tive blue­print for the ways in which we dis­cuss anti-colo­nial­ist action.

Diop’s cam­era zeroes in on the minute details of how the trea­sures are trans­port­ed and then even­tu­al­ly dis­played in their right­ful home. They are treat­ed with the utmost care and atten­tion, and there’s a ten­sion that comes from see­ing these pre­cious objects being moved and placed in crates, lest they crum­ble before their home­com­ing is achieved.

Though Diop is mea­sured when it comes to empathis­ing with how peo­ple are react­ing to this, see­ing it as nei­ther a full-bore tri­umph or humil­i­at­ing­ly super­fi­cial ges­ture con­sid­er­ing that the 26 pieces here make up a tiny pro­por­tion of the 1000s that were forcibly removed from their place of ori­gin. In the film’s final mas­ter­stroke, Diop gives a voice to the pieces them­selves, a deep, God-like vocoder drawl in which hopes, woes and mem­o­ries are intoned.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

By becom­ing a mem­ber you can sup­port our inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ism and receive exclu­sive essays, prints, week­ly film rec­om­men­da­tions and more.