In 2021, 26 treasures that French colonial troops had pillaged from the African kingdom of Dahomey in 1892 made the long journey home from a museum in Paris to what is now the Republic of Benin. Their repatriation is the subject of Mati Diop’s “Dahomey,” which juxtaposes the historical account of the artifacts’ restitution and the Beninese reaction to it with imagined narration from those artifacts. The French-Senegalese filmmaker’s first feature since her Cannes Jury Prize-winning “Atlantics,” “Dahomey” is a hybrid (non)fiction film that grapples with the tragic legacy of colonialism. It won the Golden Bear in Berlin and is Senegal’s Oscar submission for best international film.
How did you come to make “Dahomey,” which you’ve called a “fantasy documentary?”
I had a feature film in mind about the theme of restitution, where I was going to make an African mask tell its own story in the first person from the moment of its [capture] until the return to its homeland. Before I was able to start writing, I found out in the press that 26 treasures from Dahomey were about to be repatriated to Benin from France. All the ideas that I’d been thinking about were spread into “Dahomey.” In my fiction feature, the restitution was happening in 2070 or 2080; it was set in the future. So even though the conditions of shooting [“Dahomey”] were mostly a documentary situation, I still felt like I was portraying the present with a very futuristic feeling.
So this mythic quality of the statues telling their own story was in your mind from the beginning?
Yes. The mythical aspect was definitely important, but not more important than the political gesture — to create a space for certain [African] voices to be heard on the topic of restitution and the return of their own artifacts. The film [could] create a space for a dialogue among the [Beninese] youth that has been raised without the presence of these artifacts. One of the legacies of colonialism is invisibility. So for me, the film was also a meditation on what it is to have lived in a reality where your [country’s] history has no physical existence, when you are told, even in an indirect way, that your history did not really happen, that it has less value than the story of Western [civilization]. And that’s deeply alienating.
Another legacy of colonization that you explore is language. The Beninese college students who debate the significance of the restitution speak French, the language of the colonizer. One woman even mentions how wrong it feels not to be expressing herself in [the Beninese language] Fon. But the artifacts speak Fon. That’s an interesting tension.
Yes. It’s very important to me as a French-Senegalese filmmaker to make sure that the protagonists of the films I shoot on the [African] continent speak their own language, and that these languages are embraced. To have the artifacts speak their own language was also a way to underline the fact that in the country they go back to, French has become the dominant language. So there’s the power of domination. In the debate, this young lady almost seems to realize it while she’s saying it — like, “I can’t believe I’m talking to you right now in French. All I can do is talk about alienation, but in the language of the colonized.”
You mentioned infusing a futuristic quality into your film. This comes through in the voice of the artifacts, which is a multi-layered, agendered, almost metallic sound. How did you come up with that?
I wanted to give them back their power. It was important to de-folklorize them, decolonize them. A lot of spaces and symbols have been reduced to stereotypes by the colonial eye, such as our traditions, our ancestors, our ceremonies — everything has been reduced to folklore exoticism. The way you make these stereotypes die is to reinvent a new form that is inspiring and gives power back to the African. And I think that it’s important also to kill the idea that ancestors should be enclosed in the space of the past. Ancestors shouldn’t be an image of the past. Ancestors have to be revitalized by the present and spread into the future. It’s a force we have to embrace for ourselves as Afro-descendants.
A version of this story first appeared in the SAG Preview/Documentaries/International issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
