Final Rating: 4/5
The western world finally seems to understand that museums filled with artifacts collected by colonizers who went around plundering anything they thought was interesting from around the world isn’t a good look. Slowly anthropological exhibits have been returning objects stolen from cultures back to the rightful owners. Whether it is called “white guilt” or just finally realizing people like Christopher Columbus were never the heroes, it doesn’t matter. A part of reparations is giving up what was never yours in the first place.
In Dahomey, Mati Diop’s second feature film and follow up to 2019’s Atlantics, the French-Senegalese filmmaker follows the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, in Paris as it is in the process of returning artifacts back to Benin, a country that was formerly known as The Kingdom of Dahomey. The museum itself opened in 2006 and features “Indigenous art and cultures of Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas” (one can assume most of their collection was taken, not gifted or bought).
In 2021, they agreed to return twenty-six artifacts that France had taken some 130 years earlier. This was a very big deal. Diop was able to capture the process of the museum returning the artifacts, Benin receiving and displaying them and then the citizens having a discussion about what this all means to them in a fascinating fly on the wall documentary.
The film doesn’t feature talking heads or anyone directly explaining what is happening, as Diop mostly lets the ambient world around the art do the talking. We see museum workers in Paris loading up the works into large crates being careful to not damage anything. Then the next thing we see is the boxes being opened up in Benin’s Palais de la Marina, with the artifacts being inspected and put on display for the public. The film’s final act takes place with local university students debating the pros and cons about the returned items and what it means to them as individuals and as a society.
While on the surface not a lot happens, the way Diop uses the camera to shoot the movie makes viewers feel more involved, like they are standing in the same room just watching everything. The shots are stationary, with slow zooms being used to allow us to hyper focus on the beauty and mystique of the artifacts. We watch as other people stare in awe at their own history.
The Kingdom of Dahomey became a cultural point of interest and debate in 2022 when The Woman King was released, where right wing commentators tried to bring the film down by bringing up Dahomey’s history of enslaving other African peoples as a way of enacting cultural whataboutism and deflecting from America’s own sordid history with slavery.
Another aspect that makes this film so unique is there are bits of narration, done by artifact number twenty-six, written and performed by Haitian poet Makenzy Orcel. This narration is done using otherworldly effects making Orcel sound like a cross between a ghost and a god. It is revealed that this artifact is a statue of King Ghézo, Dahomey’s ruler from 1818 to 1859 (portrayed by John Boyega in The Woman King).
King Ghézo talks about the life he remembered in Dahomey and being stuck in a museum for so long. When he returns to Benin he is excited to be back, but doesn’t recognize the land as his former home. When visiting museums it isn’t unusual to wonder what the life of the works may have taken, and if they could talk what would they say. Here we get a gothic romantic story being told to us about what the statue might be feeling. It’s beautiful and poetic and adds a narrative layer to the observational film.
Some of the other works include a statues of King Glele (son of Ghézo) and King Béhanzin (son of Glele and last ruler of Dahomey) who is depicted with fins after he declared war on France and referring to the people of Dahomey as sharks in the water. There was also a throne with tiers of carved objects supporting the seat. On the upper tier maid servants are depicted serving the King, while the lower tier shows slaves chained together representing the expansionist politics of Dahomey.
As the film goes from almost wordless to the debate portion we learn what the young people of Dahomey feel ideologically. There are debates about if the return of the artifacts were only done to make the current President of Benin, Patrice Talon, look good and to distract from the country suffering in other aspects like large amounts of people living in poverty. There are also rumours that Talon is an ancestor of slave traders who helped the French steal the original pieces.
Students were also outraged that the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac houses over 7,000 artifacts that are considered stolen from other countries and only decided to return twenty-six of them to Benin, while not giving any others back to both Benin and countries France colonized and invaded. The exhibit is only being held on the grounds of the Presidential Palace, meaning that unless you have access to one of the largest cities in the country you can’t see it.
The film is a stunning document as the people of Benin both contend with where they stand with their own history and France’s colonization of their people, much in the same way Diop did in her own life trying to connect her roots between France, the country she was born in and Senegal, the country her family is from. As the rest of the world slowly starts to understand the long reverberation of colonization, films like Dahomey will become incredibly valuable tools to learn and understand from.
Thank you to Touchwood PR and Mubi for the screener.
