Review: "Dahomey"

Mati Diop's sophomore feature establishes her as one of cinema's most singular filmmaking voices working today.

If there was ever a time for documentary filmmaking to be taken seriously by the Oscars and the directors branch, one time would be now with Mati Diop’s Dahomey, which won the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlin Film Festival. Proof that documentaries can be more than talking-head interviews juxtaposed with snippets of real-life video footage, Dahomey serves as a simultaneous chronicling of historical events and familiar exercise in fantastical themes present in Mati Diop’s previous feature.

In Diop’s feature directorial debut Atlantics, she crafts a ghost story to tell a power struggle between working-class migrants and magnates who treat their workers as disposable. Her latest feature, Dahomey, relies on haunting narration to create a fusion of realism with the supernatural. As the film documents the retrieval of 26 royal artifacts from the Kingdom of Dahomey that were claimed by French colonialists, the 26th object, a statue of King Ghézo, is characterized through ghostly voice-over by Haitian writer Makenzy Orcel.

From when the King Ghézo statue is first removed from the box it’s been encased in to its eventual arrival in its home country, Orcel’s narration as Ghézo illustrates a grappling of both its own past and how it and the Beninese people of today will reckon with their future. Although it and the other 25 statues are being brought back to their rightful home, there’s still the question of “What now?” that is further reflected in a pivotal sequence involving a debate between students at the University of Abomey-Calavi.

The various viewpoints being expressed, including anger that only 26 of the 7,000 total artifacts claimed by France were returned home, stress how artifacts are more than just uncannily made sculptures and statues. As much as there are those grateful that they have some because they’re still part of their land’s history, those feeling chagrin over the few pieces they’ve gotten still crave more as a way of confronting the European colonialism that would cause their own culture to be deprived from them.

The King Ghézo statue being given a literal voice by Mati Diop, Makenzy Orcel and sound designers Nicolas Beker, Cyril Holz, Corneille Houssou, who’re all instrumental in crafting the voice in a spectral fashion, similarly underlines how artifacts are an immortalizing of the past that will carry over into the present and future as long as they’re still standing and put together. It makes a film that delves into colonialism as well as the nature of art itself feel like more of a haunting rallying cry and ultimately shows how innovative documentary movie making can be. Despite its short 68 minute runtime, Dahomey will have you under its spell long after the credits roll.

Grade: A

Dahomey is now out in select theaters and is currently released by MUBI.