DAHOMEY

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DAHOMEY

By Mati DIOP

NEW HORIZONS INT'L FILM FESTIVAL / NEW HORIZONS ASSOCIATION - as DISTR Theatrical, TV, DVD-video, VOD, POLAND / FEST

Documentary - Completed 2024

Festivals
& Awards

Berlinale - EFM 2024

Golden Bear

New Horizons International Film Festival Poland 2024

Masters Section

- Year of production
- 2024
- Genres
- Documentary
- Countries
- FRANCE, BENIN
- Director(s)
- Mati DIOP
- Writer(s)
- Mati DIOP
- Producer(s)
- Mati DIOP, Eve ROBIN, Judith LOU LEVY
- Synopsis
- Mati Diop's latest film is a psychodramatic documentary about the return of looted treasures. Twenty-six objects depart from Paris's Quai Branly to find themselves in the Kingdom of Dahomey—today's Benin—after more than a century. This journey is not only a symbolically and politically weighty event but also a kind of resurrection. The powerful statue of King Ghezo awakens in the museum's underground and speaks out. The monarch's monologue, whose spirit was trapped in wood and metal, creates a poetic layer of the film, allowing the objects, reduced to the role of artworks or ethnographic curiosities, to regain their true powers. Dahomey shifts the perspective: it doesn't address the decolonization of Western institutions but focuses on what restitution means for those to whom stolen statues or thrones are returned. Is this just a distraction from current issues? Why only 26 treasures when thousands were taken? Can a nation be robbed of its spirit? How to liberate oneself from the influence of the language and culture of the former colonizer? Who is the exhibition of the brought-back objects intended for? Diop films a student debate, giving voice to the youth on whom the lessons of their own history depend. Lyrical yet manifestly political and open to ambivalence — Dahomey is a lesson in historical politics at its finest.

DAHOMEY

Festivals& Awards

Festivals
& Awards