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 Berlinale, 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.
Golden Bear for Best Film, Berlin 2024
Gildas Adannou, Habib Ahandessi, Joséa Guedje
France/Senegal/Benin
2024
In French, Fon and English with English subtitles
Book Tickets
Indigenous & Community Access
Indigenous Access Tickets Community Access Tickets Ticket Donation Requests
Credits & Director
Executive Producer
Christiane Chabi Kao
Producer
Eve Robin, Judith Lou Lévy, Mati Diop
Screenwriter
Mati Diop
Cinematography
Josephine Drouin Viallard
Editor
Gabriel Gonzalez
Original Music
Wally Badarou, Dean Blunt
Mati Diop
Mati Diop, born in Paris in 1982, has garnered acclaim for her eclectic body of work since the early 2000s. Her feature film Atlantics (2019), which won the Grand Prix at Cannes, established her as a leading figure in international arthouse cinema and of a new wave in African and diasporic cinema. Raised in a Franco-Senegalese family with a musician father and a photographer and art buyer mother, Diop’s films, including Atlantiques (2009) and Mille Soleils (2013), explore themes of migration, colonialism, and African identity. Her second feature, Dahomey (2024), continues her focus on artistic activism in Africa.
Filmography: Atlantique (2019)
Photo by Henry Roy
Missing VIFF? Check Out What's Playing at the VIFF Centre
Once Upon a Time in Harlem
Once Upon a Time in Harlem splices together footage shot by William Greaves in 1972 of a group of Harlem Renaissance luminaries in conversation at Duke Ellington’s townhouse. The film is a living archive of memory, disagreement, style, and Black genius.
Get Out
Guess who's coming to dinner? Daniel Kaluuya is the Black boyfriend justifiably anxious about meeting his white girlfriend's folks for the first time in Jordan Peele's satiric modern horror classic, one of a series curated by our VIFF+ Premium members.
Possible Love
Lee Chang-dong’s first film since Burning (2018) is a sardonic, slow-burning satire about two couples: a documentary filmmaker married to a wealthy businessman, and a working-class family struggling to make ends meet after the husband has been laid off.
The Haunting
Directed by Robert Wise in 1963, The Haunting is a classic exercise in the suggestive power of cinema, adapted from Shirley Jackson's 1959 best-seller, The Haunting of Hill House, a provocative blend of supernatural and psychological horror.
A. Rimbaud
Patrick Wang (The Bread Factory) presents the life of French poet Arthur Rimbaud in this staggeringly adventurous and deeply considered movie, a three-hour, one-man show quite unlike anything we have seen before. "Poetic, audacious and singular."