Before making her feature film debut with 2019’s Atlantics, French-Senegalese director Mati Diop produced a series of poetic short films, all of which explored a different oblique angle on the legacy of colonialism. Some, like A Thousand Suns (2013), consider the role of filmmaking in defining and communicating the anti-colonial struggle. That film focused on the actor Magaye Niang, star of Touki-Bouki, directed by Diop’s late uncle, Djibril Diop Mambéty. Others, like the short-film version of Atlantiques (2009), explore the false promises of immigration for poor men in Senegal, for whom Europe is a dream that, siren-like, lures them to their deaths. Whether looking at the crises of today or the centuries-long context of oppression that largely defines our present moment, Diop has consistently regarded colonial Europe as a sort of shapeshifting menace, a hypnotic toxin that takes many fatal forms.
Diop’s latest film Dahomey is a hybrid documentary about plunder and return, the political and ethical questions regarding the repatriation of artworks and artifacts that were stolen from their countries of origin in the last several centuries. A sort of spiritual heir to Statues Also Die, a 1953 collaboration between Chris Marker and Alain Resnais that examined the theft of cultural and religious objects and their subsequent transformation into “art” by the European museum system, Dahomey serves as a kind of historical bookend. As France begins returning items from the Dahomey kingdom to present-day Benin, could it be too late to really make a difference?
In just over an hour, Diop provides viewers with a sharp, economical film essay about this problem, and does so within a fairly recognizable avant-doc form. For the first part of Dahomey, the film quietly observes the labor involved in removing artworks from French exhibitions and sending them back to Benin. Diop patiently watches the mechanics of crating up, shipping, and re-installing these repatriated artifacts and artworks, 26 of which were relinquished by the Macron government in an agreement with Benin’s billionaire president Patrice Talon. In a clever turn, one of the statues, “No. 26,” has the deep male voice of a first-person narrator, describing his strange, painful exile in France and trying to make sense of his belated homecoming.
But it’s in its second half that Dahomey really comes to life. Diop shows us a very contentious discussion at a Beninese conference relating to the objects’ return. It’s a perfect example of Brechtian political cinema, with the political stakes and conflicting opinions of the situation being laid bare as active concerns. Why only 26, out of hundreds? Are the Beninese people supposed to be grateful? Is this the best that Talon’s government could do? Then again, if not for this meager return, would this revitalized conversation about pillage and patrimony even be happening right now? How does the deal between France and Benin recall 19th-century Dahomey’s collusion with the European slave trade? And as these works go from a Parisian to a Beninese museum, does that make them more accessible to anyone? How much does cultural memory really mean when so many people are in poverty? Diop, of course, leaves us to puzzle out these problems.
Before each screening at the Toronto International Film Festival, where Dahomey premiered, there’s a brief trailer providing an acknowledgment that Toronto was built on the unceded territory of several First Nations tribes. TIFF’s land acknowledgment asks the viewer to consider this complicated past, and tells us that the festival is “grateful to be able to work on these lands.” While I absolutely believe that Indigenous rights, including land rights and sovereignty, are vital political matters, one must wonder what the land acknowledgment statement actually accomplishes. TIFF is hardly alone in this, and as a gesture it is mostly a way for arts institutions to feign concern regarding white settler colonialism, when there is no intention whatsoever of returning the stolen real estate or allowing disenfranchised tribes to benefit from the money their tribal lands are now worth. It was particularly ironic to see this trailer before the festival screening of Dahomey. Diop’s film strikes one as the ultimate riposte to this kind of feckless, optics-based liberalism.
Published as part if TIFF 2024 — Dispatch 2.
