REVIEW: Dahomey [2024]

Rating: NR | Runtime: 68 minutes
Release Date: September 11th, 2024 (France) / October 25th, 2024 (USA)
Studio: Les Films du Losange / MUBI
Director(s): Mati Diop
Writer(s): Mati Diop

I never left. I am here.

There are three things happening during Mati Diop’s Dahomey, a documentary account of twenty-six royal treasures stolen from the Republic of Dahomey by France being repatriated back to what is now the Republic of Benin. One: the treasures’ own experience of their return as depicted through a booming voice against a black screen. Two: a rousing debate by students at the University of Abomey-Calavi about what, in their estimation, this act means … and doesn’t mean. Three: the ultimate result with citizens traveling to the museum to view these artifacts while politicians applaud themselves for making it happen.

It’s a powerful account of just how complex the concept of colonialism remains and how its hold on freed nations doesn’t automatically disappear via independence. The poetic the words Diop gives the treasures is thought-provoking on its own by providing them the dream of seeing daylight again while also the cynicism of wondering whether trading one museum for another really changes anythings, but the arguments made by the students are what resonate most because they are the real victims here. They’re the ones who’ve lost the ability to grow up with the physical portion of their heritage existing alongside the spiritual portion.

And none of them are wrong despite their passionate rejections of what the others are saying. It is an insult that France only returned twenty-six pieces of an estimated seven thousand in their possession because it does extend their hold on Benin by positing they control the artwork’s fate rather than the descendants of its creators. But it’s also a victory that the nation now has twenty-six more pieces of its history than it did yesterday because you cannot hope to reclaim everything if you never take the steps to start the process. Both things can be true. The Beninese people can rejoice in what was accomplished while continuing to fight for everything that must still be done.

Diop does a wonderful job splicing these demands and appreciations against the backdrop of the event itself. She gives the celebratory nature of the repatriation necessary context on both sides of the spectrum so we as outsiders can understand the lasting effects of European conquest. And even if the conversation doesn’t necessarily come to a definitive conclusion about what should be done moving forward (giving credit to the president, calling out the hypocrisy of doing so, weighing the benefits of diplomacy against the eye-for-an-eye desire to simply go and take it all like France did), it gets people thinking about what this act truly means to them. Because while some will use it to heal wounds, it will help others fully grasp the century-plus of pain those wounds caused.