Dahomey

In 1892, French colonial troops plundered thousands of cultural artifacts from the Kingdom of Dahomey. In 2021, 26 of them returned to the Republic of Benin. Their journey is narrated by the statue of King Ghezo in an oneiric, lyrical monologue. While these traditional treasures are initially received with reverential pomp and circumstance, students at the University of Abomey-Calavi vigorously debate the political motivations of the restitution while discussing ongoing issues of self-determination, education, and recovering their culture’s stolen soul.

Winner of the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, Mati Diop’s first feature since her 2019 debut Atlantics is one of the year’s most innovative and profound documentaries. Infusing its historical and cultural subjects with a dreamlike atmosphere and blending reality with the fantastical, Dahomey is transformed by the interplay between the metaphysical perspective of the stolen artifacts and the incendiary insights of the students’ debate, providing a poetic scaffolding for the film to envision a new postcolonial horizon.

At just over an hour, Diop’s strange, captivating and rigorously intellectual film leaves a mighty impression well beyond its compact length.

Stephen A Russell, Time Out

Diop fashions her superb, short but potent hybrid doc “Dahomey” as a slim lever that cracks open the sealed crate of colonial history, sending a hundred of its associated erasures and injustices tumbling into the light.

Jessica Kiang, Variety

Mati Diop’s captivating, fabulistic documentary Dahomey confronts the reality of how modernity has been shaped by the West’s theft of cultural heritage.

Pat Brown, Slant magazine