Dahomey (2024)
The question of what happens to cultural heritage stolen under colonialism is one that museums across Europe have been forced to sit with, uncomfortably, for decades. Nowhere is that discomfort more pointed than in the case of the royal treasures of Dahomey, a powerful West African kingdom (roughly corresponding to modern-day Benin) that was conquered by French forces in 1892. In the aftermath of that military campaign, hundreds of artefacts, thrones, statues, and sacred objects were carried back to Paris and installed at the Musée du quai Branly, where they remained for well over a century. In 2021, following years of diplomatic pressure and a landmark report commissioned by President Emmanuel Macron, France agreed to return 26 of those objects to Benin. It was a moment that generated genuine headlines and a genuine argument, not just about those 26 pieces, but about the estimated 90,000 or more African objects still sitting in French public collections. Dahomey arrives as a document of that handover, and of the conversations it sparked.
Mati Diop is a director whose work rewards attention. Her feature debut, Atlantics, brought a quietly supernatural sensibility to the story of Senegalese migrants and the women they left behind, and announced her as a filmmaker willing to blur the line between the political and the poetic. Dahomey is her first documentary, produced through Les Films du Bal alongside Fanta Sy and ARTE France Cinéma, and it won the Golden Bear at the 2024 Berlin International Film Festival, which is not a minor thing. The film runs a spare 68 minutes, and its formal approach is distinctly unconventional: rather than assembling historians and curators in front of a camera, Diop gives voice to the objects themselves, most notably to one of the repatriated statues, which speaks in a kind of incantatory monologue written by the Haitian-Beninese author Makenzy Orcel. It is, on its face, a bold way to approach material that lesser filmmakers might have handled with reverent but inert reverence. For those interested in the broader tradition of francophone African cinema, the lineage here runs through Ousmane Sembène's Black Girl and the restless formal experiments of Touki Bouki, films that refused to let their politics settle into comfortable shapes.
The principal on-screen presences are drawn not from the world of professional performance but from cultural and academic life. Lucrèce Hougbelo and Dowoti Desir appear as cultural historians, Parfait Vaiayinon, Didier Sedoha Nassangade, and Sabine Badjogoumin as students whose debate sequences give the film its most conventionally discursive stretch. None of them are household names, and the film does not require them to be. What Diop seems to want from her human participants is not expert testimony so much as an emotional register, a sense of what it actually feels like to receive something back that was taken before anyone living was born. Whether that ambition translates to the screen is, of course, the central question.
I went into Mati Diop’s 2024 documentary Dahomey completely blind, having absolutely no idea what to expect. The core subject matter is undeniably fascinating: the repatriation of 26 royal artefacts from France back to Benin, some 130 years after they were looted. On paper, it’s a cracking historical reckoning and Diop takes the interesting decision to frame this monumental event through a highly unusual, almost avant-garde lens. Rather than relying on talking heads or historical experts, the film is narrated largely from the first-person perspective of the artefacts themselves.
Hearing a centuries-old wooden statue ponder its own displacement is a nice twist for the first twenty minutes. But honestly, the novelty wears off incredibly quickly when you realise you’re about to sit through multiple long ten-minute plus, dialogue-free sequence of museum staff carefully bubble-wrapping and packing these items into crates. It’s a bold stylistic choice, sure, but watching the logistical process of loading a plane doesn't exactly make for gripping cinema. The pacing grinds to an absolute halt, turning what should be a triumphant homecoming into a rather tedious exercise in watching freight forwarding.
What makes this all the more frustrating is the sheer amount of missed narrative potential. For a film about such a profound act of historical restitution, you learn remarkably little about the actual context. Diop glosses over how and why these treasures were violently taken in the first place, skims over what they actually mean to the people of Benin, and leaves the future implications entirely up in the air. There is a brief, interesting debate at a university towards the end, but it feels entirely disconnected from the rest of the film's hypnotic, almost sleepy rhythm. It’s really average from a journalistic respect, leaving you with far more questions than answers.
Dahomey is a bit of a mess when it comes to balancing its artistic ambitions with its historical duty. Mati Diop had a profoundly important story on her hands, one that demanded rigorous examination and emotional depth, but instead delivered a visually polished, incredibly dull art-house exercise. It’s a harmless enough watch if you’re specifically in the mood for some slow, contemplative cinema about museum logistics, but for anyone looking to understand the true weight of colonial restitution, it’s a massive letdown.
Dahomey sits in an interesting and slightly awkward position in Diop's filmography and in the broader conversation about restitution, a conversation that is very much ongoing and very much unresolved. The formal risks she takes here are genuine ones, and it is worth noting that slow, object-centred documentary work has produced genuinely absorbing films before (Godard's Goodbye to Language comes to mind as a companion piece in wilful inscrutability, if not in subject matter). The subject itself, colonial theft, the politics of cultural memory, the gap between a diplomatic gesture and genuine reckoning, is as serious as cinema gets. Whether this particular film does justice to that seriousness is something each viewer will need to weigh for themselves. Sometimes the most important stories are let down by the frames built around them.
Rating: ★★ | Year: 2024 | Watched: 2026-07-21
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Dahomey (2024) on YouTube
Where to watch
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