Keep knowledgeable with free updates
Merely signal as much as the Movie myFT Digest — delivered on to your inbox.
Disorientation awaits within the sensible, bracing documentary Dahomey. In a world of countless operating occasions, the movie says what it desires in little greater than an hour, principally with calm, useful photographs of individuals working or speaking. The result’s mind-expanding: a narrative of the right here and now borne from the previous, and addressing the longer term.
The director is Mati Diop, the French-Senegalese filmmaker whose final characteristic was Atlantics (2019), a story of migrancy and the supernatural in trendy Dakar. Right here too, west Africa and the past is her canvas. The angle has modified, nevertheless. Now we open in a stark inside, amid exhausting hats, high-vis and transport crates. Different context is proscribed in a movie the place all the pieces is misplaced.
Slowly we piece collectively that that is 2021, in a holding space at Paris’s Musée du Quai Branly, dwelling to an unlimited assortment of indigenous artworks. What we’re watching is 26 of seven,000 artefacts looted from what’s as we speak Benin by Nineteenth-century French troops and now being readied for return to Africa. (The repatriation got here after Emmanuel Macron’s 2017 pledge that France would give again all gadgets of unjustly appropriated African heritage.)
The digital camera stays coolly observant as relics are packed. Amongst them, a hulking bronze statue is recognized as Gezo, ruler of the previous kingdom of Dahomey.
“They’ve named me 26,” a voice intones towards a darkish display. After extra misplaced bearings, we realise that is the king. (The voice belongs to Haitian writer Makenzy Orcel, rendered otherworldly by sound designers.) Put so plainly, the system may sound foolish. In actual fact, his occasional narration performs as a grand flight of magical realism, including novelistic texture to non-fiction.
Again in Benin, the returnees encourage public celebrations, however are greeted solely by dignitaries. Gezo is checked by curators for oxidisation. He himself is uncertain his journey is over.
Dahomey is, in fact, a part of a reside international dialog about cultural treasures and the legacy of colonialism. Look too shortly on the movie and also you may take it for a easy celebration.
However Diop has made one thing way more looking. The important improper of artefacts having been stolen to fill European museums is handled as a given. Previous that, although, all cures really feel flawed and contentious, and Diop makes house for each argument. (One early clue to her embrace of complexity is a shot of shackled figures being packed in Paris. Dahomey itself was as soon as enriched by slavery.)
Asking the place the colonised go from right here, the remainder is a heady circulation of level and counterpoint. Thrillers have plot twists; Dahomey has concepts. It will be a spoiler to offer them away. As a substitute, you must see and listen to them for your self, held as much as the sunshine just like the returning Gezo.
★★★★★
In UK cinemas from October 25
