" African heritage must be showcased not only in Paris, but also in Dakar, Lagos and Cotonou. This will be one of my priorities. Within five years, I want the conditions to be right for African heritage to return to Africa." Such were the words spoken by Emmanuel Macron in 2017, and such was the starting point for Dahomey, Mati Diop's new documentary. Awarded the prestigious Golden Bear at the last Berlinale, the film is due to hit French cinemas on September 11, 2024.
November 2021, 26 royal treasures from Dahomey - out of 7,000 looted works - are about to leave Paris for repatriation. From the Musée du Quai Branly in Benin, these statues, funerary objects and other thrones looted during theinvasion of French colonial troops in 1892 will have to find their way and their voice to their homeland. Mati Diop is there to give them a voice.
For Dahomey is anything but a simple documentary or institutional film. The Franco-Senegalese director has created a work as artistic as its subject, bordering on the fantastic. Work 26, a statue of King Ghézo, suddenly begins to think aloud and in voice-over, in the Fon language. And gives us a glimpse into his soul, revealing his innermost thoughts on his identity and his future. Moving.
Using highly symbolic images (the boxing up of statues at the Musée du Quai Branly, like so many inanimate black men, victims of the past), the film questions the place of these ancestral works in the history of a country that has, willy-nilly, gone on without them. Or how a nation reconstitutes its memory through relics, like so many parts torn from itself.
While the issues ofAfrodescendence and post-colonialism are obviously central, the repatriation and reappropriation of these treasures raises many other questions: those of the self-determination of a people, the demand for reparations, and even a deeper questioning of French policy towards African countries.
The new generation of Beninese students at the University of Abomey Calavi are enthusiastic, and intend to keep up the fight. " We won't be politically, spiritually or economically free until our works are," they breathe.
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Cinema: which film to see today, this Wednesday December 18, 2024?
Cinema: discover the documentaries currently showing in cinemas and those to come
