In “Dahomey” Stolen Antiquities Are Reborn in Their Return

It’s a short scene, almost forgettable, in the 68-minute film, but it becomes emblematic of the kind of trance nearly everyone in Benin is under as they encounter these precious statues over 130 years after their theft. The scene is emblematic too of the trance Diop has the viewer under as we watch the story unfold in a frame rate that’s slow enough to be contemplative. From cinematographer Joséphine Drouin-Viallard’s opening shot of blinking Eiffel Tower souvenirs for sale on the sidewalks of Paris to its final sequence on the streets of Benin’s largest city, Cotonou, the spirit of the objects, a character in the film, witnesses everyday people sit and eat and converse and dance well into the night. 

With Dahomey (2024), Diop—who received international recognition when her feature Atlantics won a top prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2019—continues her embrace of blurred genre lines in her work. Another filmmaker might have ridden Atlantics’ success to a project with a Hollywood studio–sized budget, but Diop says making political work is natural to her.“With the credibility that Atlantics offered me, it gave me more freedom,” she told Interview Magazine in September 2024. “I’ve always considered myself an artist in service of a political gesture or purpose, so my films were always political.”

Tonally, the film is part science fiction and part ghost story. One senses the “gothic tale” of Atlantics as an influence on Dahomey, but Diop attunes the film’s stylistic choices to the particular context of the stolen treasures. The psychotronic narrator, the voice of the returned objects, speaks in Fon, the most common language in Benin, and sounds like an ethereal Darth Vader. Diop chose to write the narration with Haitian author Makenzy Orcel, who often writes about the underworld of Haitian society. It was also important that Diop collaborate with someone of Haitian background, because so many Haitians are descendants of enslaved people trafficked during the eighteenth century from the Bight of Benin. Benin is also the principal birthplace of the Vodun religion, which eventually flourished in Haiti.

As the story progresses, a robust debate among current students at the University of Abomey-Calavi awakens us from the film’s dreamlike state, smartly grounding the narrative in the hearts and minds of the modern-day heirs of these precious artifacts. Diop intentionally assembles students from this historically significant region: Abomey was the capital of the Kingdom of Dahomey and the seat of the royal palace from which French colonial troops stole these treasures in 1890. The passionate young people go back and forth on the significance of the return of the objects. Some are unimpressed by the pittance of the return of only 26 out of the thousands of artifacts stolen, while others are more pragmatic, supporting an incremental approach to return. A strained fidelity to the current president of Benin and his administration’s work to bring the royal treasures home, shared by at least one student in the debate, is one of the few hints of the fraught political context inside Benin present in the film. While Benin has been one of the more stable democracies in West Africa since the 1990s, in recent years advocacy groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have decried the autocratic tendencies of its president, Patrice Talon, and the erosion of democratic institutions under his tenure, citing censorship and the jailing of journalists and political opponents. 

What makes Dahomey sing is how the past, present, and future morph into something both timeless and urgent. With probing questions about restitution, spiritual animation of inanimate objects, and the modern significance of these centuries-old artifacts, Diop’s film leaves a lilting, bespoke imprint.

Ahead of the film’s US premiere at the New York Film Festival in September, I spoke with Diop via Zoom about the political context surrounding the film, how Benin has responded to Dahomey, and why it’s important for her to blur genre lines in filmmaking.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Beandrea July: After the film premiered at the Berlinale, you instituted a theatrical run of the film in Benin and Senegal. I actually first saw this film at a movie theater in Dakar last June. Why was it important for you to show the film in movie theaters in West Africa?

Mati Diop: I’m French, Senegalese. I felt it was right, fair, and important that the film would be seen first in Benin and in Senegal. For me, it’s just normal. Why would it come out in France before Africa, before Benin, and before Senegal? It was a political choice, especially in a film about restitution, as a filmmaker of African descent, to decenter myself and my film from France. It’s not to deny my French identity—it’s just not to give it more importance than my African one. This colonial heritage has very wrongly taught us to consider the West as the center, and it’s important that we counter this idea through the decisions we make. So having the film premiere in Dakar and in Cotonou is definitely a way to say, “Well, it starts here, this idea of repossession.” 

BJ: What was it like to have the audiences there experience the film? Was there anything unexpected in how they received the film? 

MD: For a very long time, there were no movie theaters open, and so to release the film there really confronted me [with] the huge challenge of bringing people back to cinema. And in Benin we did a press conference, and I think it’s the place where we talked the least about the main themes of the film, all the political subjects it brings up. I felt that the press was under censorship. It was quite heartbreaking to witness. And then when we did the screening at the university, I wished that the film would provoke a debate that would be as rich as the debate inside the film, but it wasn’t the case at all. And so it just made me realize that the debates I provoked in the film were not really reflecting the reality of the freedom people have to talk. As a filmmaker, I’m making these films for the people, and it really confronted me [with] the limits of my medium. [In Benin], it’s not easy for people to go to the theaters and debate after the film. You have to create spaces for the films to be seen and for people to feel concerned. 

BJ: You had to get the Beninese government’s permission to do your work. How were you able to negotiate a partnership with them that still enabled you to have your creative freedom?

MD: My producers and I knew from the beginning that without the permission of the government, we couldn’t do anything. Very surprisingly, the advisor of the cultural minister is a dramaturg and he ran a festival in Martinique for a long time where he had already programmed [my feature film] Atlantics, so he knew my work very well. I warned them, “You’ve seen Atlantics, so you have an idea of what I stand for. Are you ready to accept that it could have a critical eye?” And they went for it. They basically gave us all the access we needed to shoot, and they respected it until the end. When the film was finished, we went to the president’s palace, and it was very interesting to have their feedback. They could have said, “Oh, you knew nothing of Benin, and you can tell.” The only criticism they made was about the debate. They said, “We’ve heard this debate before here,” and the president said that he was a little bit disappointed by the way [the students] express[ed] themselves. It perfectly [revealed] the lack of listening on their end concerning the youth. Voila—you can’t hear what you don’t want to hear, you know? 

BJ: On the subject of the debate, it’s a really important sequence in the film. I would venture to call it a reenactment, although that’s not quite what it is, but it sort of functions that way in the film. Tell us about the casting process and the moment you understood that you would need to create this sequence in particular for the film.

MD: The day the artifacts arrived in Benin, I investigated to see if any debates had been spontaneously organized on the campus. There was a little radio talk show about it, but it was nothing special. The idea of a debate between students was something I envisioned very early on when I decided to make Dahomey, not something that came after, and because it was not initiated by them, I knew that it couldn’t be improvised. I needed to search for a very specific profile of people. So I gathered people with a different relationship to language —not only smart people knowing how to talk, but also shy people. The casting took around a month, and I did it in collaboration with a young filmmaker who assisted me on the film. We took the time to really think about the most accurate questions that could provoke interesting debates. And I chose the place because I wanted a place that was cinematic—the light, the space. This is why I kind of refute the [term] documentary. I really worked as if it was for fiction. We started shooting with three cameras, two inside and one all around the place. Then it was their space, and then it completely belonged to them. The first debate we organized was three hours. Then I came back to Paris. We did a first cut with my editor, Gabriel Gonzalez, and it was very good, but I felt that some angles were missing. And so I went back to make another debate that also lasted three hours, and then we finished editing.

BJ: The voice that narrates the whole documentary—was that something that came to you right away? 

MD: Yeah, for me, making a film about restitution is first and foremost—giving back a voice, giving back a history in its own language, which is Fon. And so to give back a voice was the first gesture [of restitution].

BJ: The still image for the main poster of the film is from the scene in the documentary where there’s a gentleman who is having a conversation with one of the returned objects. I found that moment so captivating. 

MD: The team of museum curators from Benin—they were working with the artifacts, putting them into new display cases—and one of them, Didier Donatien Alihonou, [was] talking very discreetly to one of the artifacts. I asked the director of photography to film him, to slowly and slowly get closer and closer to him. I knew it was going to be one of the main parts of the film. It was the climax of the reunion between the artifacts and their people. I didn’t want to translate, because it gives much more space to the viewer to project what’s going on between them. I think we imagine what he’s saying, [but] it’s also not about what he’s saying. It’s that he’s talking to [the artifact] and telling him, “Welcome home.”