Dahomey

 

Mati Diop: Dahomey (SN/BJ/FR 2024).

SN/BJ/FR 2024

Director: Mati Diop

Languages: English, French

Subtitles: Finnish

68 min

Festival premiere: 18 Feb 2024 Berlin - Golden Bear

Distributor: ELKE with Finnish subtitles by Salla Kivilaakso

In collaboration: Institut français de Finlande

Love & Anarchy 37th Helsinki International Film Festival (HIFF) 2024: African Express

Viewed at Bio Rex Lasipalatsi, Helsinki, Sunday 22 Sep 2204

Please note the film doesn’t have English subtitles and is only partly spoken in English!

HIFF 2024: "Winner of the Golden Bear at Berlinale, this incisive documentary delves into the legacy of colonialism and the repatriation of national treasures from Paris to Benin."

Jessica Kiang quoted by HIFF 2024: "In November 2021, 61 years after Benin gained independence from the French empire, 26 of the many thousands of plundered national antiquities were returned by France to their African home. Inserting an inquisitive, imaginative intelligence into this key moment in the troubled timeline of post-imperial cultural politics, French-Senegalese director Mati Diop fashions her superb, short but potent hybrid doc Dahomey as a slim lever that cracks open the sealed crate of colonial history, sending a hundred of its associated erasures and injustices tumbling into the light." Jessica Kiang, Variety

Peter Bradshaw quoted by HIFF 2024: "Franco-Senegalese actor and film-maker Mati Diop made history in 2019 as the first woman of colour to have a movie selected for competition at Cannes, the poetic migrant drama Atlantique. Now she brings an intriguing, 67-minute long documentary feature to Berlin: a kind of realist jeu d’ésprit or interrogative reverie about colonialism, culture, the past and the present." Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

HIFF 2024: "Kultaisen karhun Berliinissä voittanut dokumentti pureutuu kolonialismin perintöön ja Dahomeyn kuningaskunnan menetettyihin kansallisaarteisiin, jotka palautetaan Pariisista Beniniin."

Inari Ylinen (HIFF 2024): "”Mikseivät he kutsu minua oikealla nimelläni? Eivätkö he tiedä sitä?” kysyy ääni Mati Diopin vaikuttavassa dokumentissa Dahomey. Kiehtova elokuva kuvaa Dahomeyn kuningaskunnan 26 kansallisaarteen palauttamista 130 vuoden jälkeen Ranskan museoista kotiinsa nykyiseen Beniniin."

"Dokumentin ja fiktion rajat hämärtäen Diopin elokuva antaa konkreettisesti äänen historiallisille esineille ja tarkkailee niiden käymän matkan vaiheita maasta toiseen. Elokuva käsittelee kolonialismin perintöä samanaikaisesti runollisesti ja kouriintuntuvasti."

"Palautettavat esineet ovat vain murto-osa niistä tuhansista, jotka on varastettu Dahomeyn kuningaskunnasta eurooppalaisen ahneuden seurauksena. Elokuva päästää kiehtovissa väittelyjaksoissa ääneen beniniläisopiskelijat, jotka sanoittavat ristiriitaisia tunteita ja näkökulmia palautuksen ympärillä."

"Senegalilais-ranskalainen Diop palkittiin dokumentistaan Berliinin elokuvajuhlien Kultaisella karhulla. Ohjaaja teki edellisellä elokuvallaan Atlantics historiaa ensimmäisenä mustana naisena, jonka ohjaustyö valittiin Cannesin elokuvajuhlien kilpasarjaan." Inari Ylinen

AA: Mati Diop's non-fiction feature film Dahomey can be seen as a sequel to Les Statues meurent aussi / Statues Also Die (FR 1953, D: Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, Ghislain Cloquet) shot largely at the Musée de l'Homme in an age of innocence about the full significance of colonialism. Dahomey begins at Musée du Quai Branly - Jacques-Chirac where the first set of treasures is prepared for repatriation to Benin.

In Les Statues meurent aussi, the narrator was Jean Négroni. In Dahomey, the treasures themselves "take the floor". "La voix des trésors" has been written by Mati Diop in collaboration with the Haitian writer Makenzy Orcel.

It is a poetic monologue conveying a spiritual tragedy. My wife Laila saw yesterday at the Love & Anarchy festival Warwick Thornton's Australian movie The New Boy, starring Cate Blanchett, about an indigenous boy's special sensitivity, talent and power which he loses the moment he is baptized.

A similar epic sense of sacred power fields provides the background in Dahomey. Such a level of gravity was also acknowledged in Les Statues meurent aussi. Fascinatingly, some people of Benin are afraid of the repatriated statues, what they would be capable of if they would be not only repatriated but literally returned to their original location and function.

The uncanny radiation of the sacred objects can be felt even in Western colonial museums. I learned to know this at the favourite museum of my student years in West Berlin in the 1980s, das Ethnologische Museum / originally Königliches Museum für Völkerkunde, today probably dismantled.

As stated in Les Statues meurent aussi, the formidable objects were not meant to be art. Displayed in European museums, they were stripped of their sacred power and turned into objects of spectacle. This is a parallel with exponential dimensions of what Walter Benjamin meant when he wrote about the loss of aura in the age of mechanical reproduction. What happened to sacred objects was the original loss of aura, and what happened to art was a further stage in profanization.

Mati Diop poses the most fundamental question: what are these sacred objects, with their timeless and uncanny radiation, today, lost in the labyrinth of time, history and myth?

An angry debate on identity and pride is launched. 26 items of a total of 7000 stolen treasures have been repatriated. What about the rest? 

It is expensive to store art professionally. Perhaps, while starting as thieves, the Western ex-colonialists can become the best friends in safeguarding indigenous culture.

The same debate I have confronted as a film archive professional. Tropical climate is the worst for preserving photochemical film and analogue video, while in a Northern climate you can "store and forget".

...

P.S. 8 October 2024. I just read from the 3 October, 2024 issue of The New York Review of Books an essay by Alice Kaplan on Michel Leiris whose Phantom Africa (1934) and magnificent autobiographical series L'Âge d'homme (1939) and La Règle du jeu: Biffures (1948), Fourbis (1955), Fibrilles (1966) and Frêle bruit (1976) are now both evidence and an indictment of the colonialist plunder of African treasures to Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro > Musée de l'Homme > Musée du Quai Branly in which Leiris participated in the 1930s on site and later as an administrator.