November 2021. 26 royal treasures of the Kingdom of Dahomey are about to leave Paris to return to their country of origin, the present-day Republic of Benin. Along with thousands of others, these artifacts were plundered by French colonial troops in 1892. But what attitude to adopt to these ancestors’ homecoming in a country that had to forge ahead in their absence? The debate rages among students at the University of Abomey-Calavi.

Cast & Crew
Producers: Eve Robin, Judith Lou Lévy, Mati Diop
Director: Mati Diop
Script: Mati Diop
Director of Photography: Josephine Drouin Viallard
Music: Wally Badarou, Dean Blunt
Sound: Nicolas Becker, Corneille Houssou, Cyril Holtz
Editor : Gabriel Gonzalez
Production: Les Films du Bal, Fanta Sy

Awards
Best Film - Golden Berlin Bear, Berlin IFF, 2024; Movies That Matter Award, ZagrebDox, Croatia, 2024

Mati Diop (born 1982)
Mati Diop is a French film director and actress. Her diverse film work since the 2000s has established the director as a representative of a new wave of African and Afro-diasporic culture. Her feature film Atlantics won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2019. She sees cinema as a tool of reappropriation to restore lost images, question degrading colonial representations and invent new heroes and heroines. As an actress, she is known for the drama film 35 Shots of Rum (2008).

Filmography
Last Night (short, 2004), Atlantiques  (short, 2009), Snow Cannon (short, 2011), Big in Vietnam (short, 2012), A Thousand Suns (2013), Liberian Boy (short, 2015), Atlantics (2019), In My Room (short, 2020), Dahomey (2024).