NYFF '24: Mati Diop tells a ghost story in “Dahomey”

by Cláudio Alves

In a territory located within present-day Benin, there once was the Kingdom of Dahomey, which prospered from the early 17th to near the dawn of the 20th century. Around the mid-1800s, the kingdom became the focus of European imperial forces after a couple centuries as a supplier of enslaved people to the Atlantic slave trade. First came the British and then the French. The Franco-Dahomean wars led to its fracturing, a colonial schism that resulted in the kingdom's annexation into French West Africa. In 1892, when European forces invaded, thousands of treasures and historical artifacts were taken from the royal palace. For decades, they have resided in French museums despite many Beninese calls for their return. By 2021, the two nations reached an agreement.

Out of the estimated 7,000 objects, 26 pieces were shipped from the Musée du quai Branly to Cotonou, in Benin. Mati Diop's Dahomey details this journey, its cultural significance and context within the decolonization process. This year's Gold Berlin Bear winner considers all of it in a swift 68 minutes, embracing documentary techniques while combining them with a touch of poetry, perchance a phantasm…

Like her feature debut, Atlantics, Diop's Dahomey is something of a ghost story. It starts in simple, fairly detached, almost clinical observation. Before the director's camera, French museum workers prepare the 26 pieces for transport. White hands in white rooms, white faces against the dark metal and wood of the artifacts, many of which represent human figures. There's little in the ways of mediation, no imposed meaning to the images that would let the viewer recede into passivity. You must consider what you're seeing without the aid of a higher authority. And yet, the methodical work beckons a trance, the hypnotic dormancy of those lulled by sight and sound. It should feel comforting, but it's disquieting instead.

Whatever conclusions one might take from such innate reactions are pushed to the back as a voice thunders on the soundtrack. Raspy as if it had been ages since it exercised the gift of speech, this entity talks for the artifacts. Indeed, its one identity is the number 26, a cataloging denomination for a statue of King Ghezo making the trip back to the Republic of Benin. We are with it as it's being packed, the viewer's vision obscured at the same time the treasure is shrouded in darkness. The technique brings to mind POV exercises, those films where the camera takes on the shape of some subjectivity, mayhap a character or the audience's imagined presence within the setting. But this is different.

Much of political cinema is about giving voice to the voiceless, yet Diop has gone a step further in these passages. She isn't providing a megaphone to an actual person but inventing a voice where there was none. It’s the transcription of a cultural history, the diaspora's conflicting feelings, into the fictionalized specter of an object. Stentorian and sometimes sardonic, the statue is weary, eager to return to its place of origin, to see a generational injustice be righted. It's a distorted sound of impossible age, imbued with a wisdom that goes beyond the human and into the realm of ancestral entities. Some might say it's a touch of magical realism. But again, it feels different. Should we call it lyrical lucidity instead?

Though her career is still young, Diop already feels like an iconoclast, defying the form and its rules. She does this with as much conviction as her gaze burns into cultural beliefs, institutions, and whole systems. Mostly manifest when the screen is naught but a black void, Dahomey's ghostly monologue is a risky device for the director to deploy. It's also a mechanism whose tonal properties often overpower the discourse, mixing with Wally Badarou and Dean Blunt's score to produce a sense of overwhelming melancholy. A profound loss resides within the center of Dahomey, both film and region. It's the grief of forced repatriation, a history stolen and culture erased. It’s to the point where some people can't even speak their ancestors' tongue. French is the rule, a rewriter of national identity and one's sense of self.

The jubilation of return is an acknowledgment of these wounds, the scars of colonialism and their long-lasting effects. Yet, not everyone is rejoiced. After the French first act and a second movement with Beninese experts assessing the 26 artifacts, Dahomey gives way to an open debate. It starts with glimpses beyond the statue's purview, of street celebrations, and then the ceremonial doings of politicians and dignitaries. Finally, it's time for the public to interact with the pieces and for an extended discussion to take place between students and teachers from the Beninese University of Abomey-Calavi. The setting is formalized conversation, with outrage aplenty and much self-questioning, even accusations that this gesture is just another French insult. 

Diop remains steadfast in that cinematic mission of giving voice to the voiceless. But instead of her ghost artifact, she’s now amplifying young people who grapple with their countries' past, present, and future. She doesn't judge, nor does her camera, or Gabriel Gonzalez's cutting, privilege one conclusion above the other. If you come to Dahomey expecting a solution to the questions posited, you're out of luck. That's never the project's intention, nor does it work to achieve such unreachable goals. There is value in a reckoning humble enough to accept inconclusion as its endpoint. As you leave the theater, Dahomey goes with you. It haunts with its spectral voice and stimulating thought, the problems and struggle of postcolonialism resounding, screaming in your head. This is activist cinema in the form of phantasmagoria.

Dahomey has been selected as Senegal's Oscar submission and will be released, in the USA, by MUBI. It opens on October 25th.