It would be apparent to argue that those who were being colonized were not attracted to stolen artifacts when they saw the European powers go on the rampage across Africa and cut off kingdoms to pillage resources and abduct millions for the slave trade. To its credit, Mati Diop’s beautiful yet contentious video Dahomey does no try to make that explanation. What she does is attempt to tell a more in-depth narrative about the damage left by colonial conquerors and the lingering question of how to proceed.
The country, which ruled West Africa for ages before 1892 when French troops seized the country’s capital, Abomey, is where the title of the movie comes from. Stolen and transported to France for gallery exhibit were royal objects. The history of Dahomey begins in 2021 when 26 of those items were returned to Benin, the tiny island between Togo and Nigeria, in ancient Dahomey place, after years of efforts to repatriate them.
Mati Diop makes her boldest decision right away. Instead of just focusing on one of the essential parts, a monument of Dahomey’s King Ghezo in a fighting attitude, she has it function as the film’s speaker. In a deeply booming tone, the statue—voiced by award-winning author Makenzy Orcel, who also co-wrote the film with Diop—muses on its long exile (” so dark in this foreign place” ) and uncertain future ( “everything is so strange” ). The declarations of combativeness that one might expect from a warrior king who ruled an interventionist country with its own history of enslavement are abundant in the tones.
The voiced” ideas” curling out of the black also have a similar resonance to the anxiety of a slave about to leave a protracted sentence of confinement. This will be controversial for audiences as a narrative device, some of whom will view it as unknowingly comic and distancing. However, it’s a clever move by Diop that humanizes and gives the past a precise voice in ways that no amount of major research was.
Any prospective campiness that some might observe in the story is dissected by Mati Diop’s view to the actual move of the relics. She captures the mundane details of these richly mythic pieces being carefully packed for travel in the hanging-back type of director Frederick Wiseman. She uses a poetic flourish in this case, inserting a camera inside the Ghezo figure’s crate to give the impression of being buried alive when the door closes and the audio of maneuvers turning the screws to seal it shut.
In Benin, Mati Diop captures images of celebration when the cars approach the gallery where they will be displayed—dancers in planned clothes, construction workers, and visitors joyfully rubbernecking. Diop turns about quickly to an argument in place of portraying this as an pure moment of triumph, the conquered usurping property and a piece of dignity from the colonizers.
Without a prologue, we are presented with a group of young people speaking about the relocation of the paintings. They offer a variety of interpretations of the moment’s significance, from the initial step toward reparations to an emotional synchronization with a missing history or a cynical strategy by a state that cares more about symbolic gestures than taking care of the current Benin population. While the picture is not quite organic—Diop set it up with the University of Abomey-Calavi—it also serves as a great pocket audio semper. The spectators ‘ lightly moving debates and rhetoric immediately seem off-topic, but they show what an available wound the looting of the paintings left behind.
Mati Diop’s concentrating of that gathering’s controversial nature serves as its own kind of essay. She shows, with once a quiet Wiseman-like supply, people walking reverentially among the sculptures and staring in captivated wonder. A man wonders why he did n’t learn anything about his history and only encountered Western culture as a child. We can hear the crowd at the undergraduate gathering yell out in public at a woman who claims seeing the artwork made her cry. These beliefs are not given more weight than the others. Doing so might suggest that this story has a summary.
What is certain is that the earth from which the paintings were stolen no longer exists in many ways. Dahomey does seem to me to be a story that is more about the present and the future of Africa than its history, but this does not seem to indicate that relocation is irrelevant. Near the end, amidst fluttery city living scenes that recall the gentle special realism of Mati Diop’s 2019 movie Atlantics, the story declares,” I am the transition”. Change is the only constant.