The Brooklyn Rail

The noun “curate,” coming from the late fourteenth-century originated Latin word curatus, refers to “one responsible for the care (of souls).” While selected artworks have resonated with individual curators in their exhibitions of the said piece(s), that resonance doesn’t concretely translate to their institutions, as several have historically looted cultural artifacts from African countries and Indigenous territories. French Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop questions who is supportive of whom during the repatriation movement, and at what costs, in her sophomore feature Dahomey (2024). French colonial troops sieged the Kingdom of Dahomey (known today as the Republic of Benin) between 1892 and 1894. They also purloined more than seven thousand royal treasures that would later become historical art pieces housed at the Jacques Chirac Museum of Branly Quay in Paris. In 2018, France’s president Emmanuel Macron commissioned a restitution report where its findings revealed 90 percent of sub-Saharan African cultural heritage is located outside the continent; Macron announced the restitution of twenty-six of the seven thousand artifacts from Abomey, Benin promptly. After France’s National Assembly approved their return in 2020, Diop and the team filmed the transfer of the sculptures and statues from the Chirac Museum to Benin’s Palais de la Marina the following year.

Labor performed by the French and Beninese workers bulks up the first half of the breezy 68-minute feature. The exhibition installers and preservationists are obliged to conserve the twenty-six materials across the two continents as part of their job. Yet, Diop reveals the discrepancies between the Paris and Abomey museums. The Jacques Chirac Museum has more technological resources than Palais de la Marina as it takes only two Jacques Chirac employees and their transportable devices to ship a statue to Benin carefully. When the antiquities arrived in Palais de la Marina, the Abomey institution hired eight movers from vendor Africa-Dem and a forklift to fulfill the objective; their available transportation didn’t provide much room or weight to carry the objects. The circumstances directly impact the movers manually maneuvering the artwork into its new destination. Once the Palais de la Marina archivists inspected the incoming installments, they diagnosed the pieces as “average condition” and persevered with cracks, missing pieces, or deformed metal. It begs us to doubt if the Jacques Chirac Museum initially respected the previously housed art in their canon.

Diop is less interested in elucidating the decolonization of museums than in witnessing the integration of a more equitable practice in a neoliberal world. She ponders how heritage is claimed when European bureaucratic bodies dictate the journey for the physical and celestial belongings they’ve pillaged by dramatizing the life of the twenty-six objects. Across her oeuvre, Diop whisks the obscured line between reality and fantasy, as exemplified in her spellbinding feature debut Atlantics (2019) and the mid-length portrait of actor Magaye Niang, the star of her uncle Djibril Diop Mambéty’s groundbreaking Touki Bouki (1973), in A Thousand Suns (2013). She continues this magical realist prerogative in Dahomey through Gabriel Gonzalez’s oneiric editing that posits the viewer in metaphysical realms and collaborating with Haitian writer Makenzy Orcel on the characterizations and narrations of the novelties.

Orcel and Diop appointed Sound of Metal (2019) sound designer Nicolas Becker to mix the voices of actors Lucrece Houegbelo, Parfait Viayinon, and Didier Sèdoha Nassègandé to manufacture a perturbing presence in the statues, primarily the lead “Object #26.” The audience learns that 26 was King Ghezo, a past king of the Kingdom of Dahomey. However, we do not know much of the leader’s folklore that John Boyega portrayed in The Woman King (2022). Rather, Diop and Orcel characterize him as a civilian who was displaced from his homeland and stripped of his royal title. Similar to the spiritual existence of the refugees in Atlantics, Diop sees the systemic neglect in the shipped heirlooms in Dahomey. She uses cinema as a communicative mediation to parley with the dead.

King Ghezo sews the documentary’s blanket-like skeleton. He transports the audience into a debate among the University of Abomey-Calavi students over the long overdue action from France’s government that spotlights the film’s second half. Opinions from the student body range from “a boost to Macron’s brand” and a slap in the face for only sending twenty-six objects to “gratifying France” and strategizing on demanding the remaining art pieces. This noteworthy chapter soaks in the pride, the anguish, and the precarity in obtaining meaning. One student observes that this isn’t purely on museums and perceives it as an allegory for the worldwide oppression caused by Western civilization. This so-called victory is not the final result but an examination of persisting in the good fight. Such cases are a step forward to effectuate liberation.

Dahomey converges Diop with France’s nonfiction lineage, particularly with Chris Marker and Jean Rouch, in her speculative documentary regarding Black representation. She inverts the focus of Marker, Ghislain Cloquet, and Alain Resnais’s colonial critique Statues Also Die (1953) by grounding the perspective of the African-rooted art pieces and avoiding the predominant European visitors stepping into these environments. Marker, Cloquet, and Resnais connect imperialism in the art world to its counterparts, whereas Dahomey is set in a museum’s interiors and exteriors, outside of the bookended city shots and scholastic conversation to evoke the limited mobility a statue has when they are compulsorily placed in a wooden box and a glassed cage. Diop also interrogates Rouch’s “shared anthropology,” as the “cinéma vérité” co-creator had controversial edits in illustrating the Hauka ceremonies in Les maîtres fous (1955), and future Nigerian filmmaker Oumarou Ganda (playing himself as pseudonym Edward G. Robinson) in Moi, un noir (1958). Here, Diop devoids the spectacle in favor of the strenuous assays it takes to make progress.

The sights on the new, hopefully permanent exhibition at Palais de la Marina are at the core of Dahomey. Diop weaves out the spectators’—visitors, employees, and special guests—resonance with the sculptures through closeups of their faces. Their breath is taken away when they find inspiration and profoundness when they feel seen in them. Diop observes their cultural connection when they interact with the installation. As with King Ghezo, the true stories and experiences of the African diaspora are in Black people’s blood, veins, and minds. During the current scholasticide of Black history in the United States, United Kingdom, and other countries, griots (West African historians) are the true history preservationists, passing on rituals and folklore to their descendants. Diop discerns cinema as a time capsule and purveyor with the camera when she honors and safeguards their testimonies. She bluntly reminds us that repatriation is not an act of repair or a remedy when injustices are still enacted. Instead, it is an intervention in our society that is still going through the long-term ramifications of the Atlantic slave trade. She blueprints hermeneutic and cultural items for the youth and future generations to learn from.