Dahomey: The Political Power of Mati Diop’s Cinema (review)
With this formidable experimental documentary, Golden Bear in Berlin, the filmmaker questions the thinking and effects of the restitution of works of art to their country of origin.
The strength of the new film by Mati Diop (Atlantic…), Golden Bear at the last Berlinale, is based on its subject, the restitution by France of a handful of Beninese works of art, and on the language used to spark the reflections prompted by such an event. If statues also die – to borrow the beautiful title of the film by Resnais and Marker (1953) – it is because they are above all alive. Their souls are personified here by the spectral and magical voice of lot 26, an imposing statue of King Ghézo, ninth king of the kingdom of Dahomey (Benin) whose filmmaker films the journey from the Quai Branly Museum in Paris to the Presidential Palace in Cotonou. This voice haunts the depths of a film that carries with it the crashes and wounds of the colonization of Africa. Everything is so strange… So far from the country I saw in my dreams… “, asks this mastodon of wood and metal in the Fongbé language.
The return to the sources that officials boast of being “historical” thus becomes an intimate and philosophical epic. This notion of the revenant preoccupies Mati Diop who, from film to film, draws a constant circulation between territories. The language of this feature film is embodied in its second part through the voices of young Beninese debating in the walls of a University the scope of this restitution, salutary certainly but which cannot in any way alleviate consciences. It is a nocturnal wandering that finally punctuates this interstellar journey with this idea of the rediscovered power of the movement: ” I see myself clearly through you, I will not stop… »
By Mati Diop. Documentary. Duration 1h08. Released on September 11, 2024
