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Disorientation awaits in the brilliant, bracing documentary Dahomey. In a world of endless running times, the film says what it wants in little more than an hour, mostly with calm, functional shots of people working or talking. The result is mind-expanding: a story of the here and now borne from the past, and addressing the future.
The director is Mati Diop, the French-Senegalese filmmaker whose last feature was Atlantics (2019), a tale of migrancy and the supernatural in modern Dakar. Here too, west Africa and the beyond is her canvas. The angle has changed, however. Now we open in a stark interior, amid hard hats, high-vis and shipping crates. Other context is limited in a film where everything is out of place.
Slowly we piece together that this is 2021, in a holding area at Paris’s Musée du Quai Branly, home to a vast collection of indigenous artworks. What we are watching is 26 of 7,000 artefacts looted from what is today Benin by 19th-century French troops and now being readied for return to Africa. (The repatriation came after Emmanuel Macron’s 2017 pledge that France would give back all items of unjustly appropriated African heritage.)
The camera stays coolly observant as relics are packed. Among them, a hulking bronze statue is identified as Gezo, ruler of the former kingdom of Dahomey.
“They have named me 26,” a voice intones against a dark screen. After more lost bearings, we realise this is the king. (The voice belongs to Haitian author Makenzy Orcel, rendered otherworldly by sound designers.) Put so plainly, the device might sound silly. In fact, his occasional narration plays as a grand flight of magical realism, adding novelistic texture to non-fiction.
Back in Benin, the returnees inspire public celebrations, but are greeted only by dignitaries. Gezo is checked by curators for oxidisation. He himself is unsure his journey is over.
Dahomey is, of course, part of a live global conversation about cultural treasures and the legacy of colonialism. Glance too quickly at the film and you might take it for a simple celebration.
But Diop has made something far more searching. The essential wrong of artefacts having been stolen to fill European museums is treated as a given. Past that, though, all remedies feel flawed and contentious, and Diop makes space for every argument. (One early clue to her embrace of complexity is a shot of shackled figures being packed in Paris. Dahomey itself was once enriched by slavery.)
Asking where the colonised go from here, the rest is a heady flow of point and counterpoint. Thrillers have plot twists; Dahomey has ideas. It would be a spoiler to give them away. Instead, you should see and hear them for yourself, held up to the light like the returning Gezo.
★★★★★
In UK cinemas from October 25
