Dahomey

Mati Diop’s second feature, Dahomey, begins where your stereotypical globe-spanning adventure film ends: an edifice of boxed-up artifacts from a non-extant kingdom, carefully stacked in a temperature-controlled storage room beneath a nondescript museum, catalogued and inventoried for posterity’s sake. These relics are kept in the dark thousands of miles from home, effectively jailed by some Western nation. Ask Indiana Jones, and he’d say it’s where such things belong. The people of Benin — originally the Kingdom of Dahomey, later the Republic of Dahomey — aren’t as convinced. In her feature-length documentary debut, Diop tracks the journey of these 26 relics from the Musée du Quai Branly–Jacques Chirac in Paris to their new (and old) home in Abomey, Benin.

Their departure and arrival couldn’t be more different. With the artifacts transported in the dead of night, quickly and quietly, the French museum’s repatriation campaign is the very definition of hush-hush. However, what was delivered in shame is received with honor: On landing in the former royal city, the objects are met with an energy as bright and proud as the morning sun. Black-screen interludes break up the timeline of events, showing the audience what the anthropomorphized cultural heirlooms are experiencing inside their cramped wooden crates: Gruff, dejected voices narrate in unison, voicing their confusion, fear, and anger over the way they’ve been so carelessly passed around over the centuries.

These breaks from Diop’s otherwise observational documentary form may be overtly fictionalized, but — as the viewer learns, once the festivities conclude and the reality of the exchange starts to set in — they’re a precursor to the very real, very conflicted emotions of the people of Benin. Out of more than 7,000 stolen works from the Kingdom of Dahomey, why did the French only return less than half a percent? What’s more, why did the former king aid and abet the plundering colonizers in the first place? There’s no easy resolution to these questions, nor to what to do with these newly returned items now that they’ve actually arrived. Diop opens up the back half of the documentary to a much larger discussion about colonization and decolonization, languages lost and learned, culture both material and immaterial, politics, war, revolution, and even museums themselves.

Diop isn’t searching for simple solutions. In fact, she leads one to believe there might not even be such a thing in a geo-socio-political-economic scenario as complex as this. It’s an intentional ambivalence: By capturing as many differing viewpoints as she can — and relying on Haitian novelist and poet Makenzy Orcel to spur additional conversations in the mind of the observer with those voiceover sections — Dahomey stands as a supremely thoughtful, enormously considerate documentary. It packs hours’ worth of well-informed rumination into an impressive 68-minute runtime. To simply say this takes skill is to understate Diop’s personal connection to the film. She’s French-Senegalese, meaning she’s made this trip from Paris to West Africa herself.

The right thing, the wrong way, a nice try, a vain gesture … Dahomey refuses to put this unquestionably historic act of cultural repatriation into any one of these boxes. Indeed, if there’s any definitive takeaway, it’s that putting history in a box is a big part of the problem. The film is all the more impactful for it.