By the time you’ll read this, Yerevan and the Golden Apricot International Film Festival will already be a not-so-distant memory. I’ve been mulling over your question “what makes a film a film” for the past few days, and I think both Mati Diop’s Dahomey and Yervand Vardanyan’s Orbita rely heavily on their visual and sonic language to raise questions about nationality, camaraderie, and cultural nuance. In Diop’s documentary, which won this year’s Golden Bear at the Berlinale, 26 artifacts leave Paris for the Kingdom of Dahomey, now present-day Benin. People, rather than treasures, are the film’s focus, and yet Diop shoots her film from the perspective of “26,” a repatriated statue of King Gezo from the Benin-bound collection. Functioning like one of Yasujirō Ozu’s pillow shots, 26 has the ability to see everything, but his life has mostly been shrouded in darkness. Boxed and hidden from the world, 26 is angry. Resentment pulsates from his very being. His pejorative monologues, written by Haitian poet Makenzy Orcel, fuel the film’s episodic narrative with power, directly contrasting with the cool, sterile Parisian art handlers, who hold him hostage and appraise his worth as merely “acceptable” rather than priceless.
The students of Benin match 26’s energy. During a heated public debate about their stolen cultural assets at the University of Abomey-Calavi, they come in hot with an anger that is not only striking but legitimate. However, unlike 26, who is inanimate and singular in his voiceover, these youths are reminiscent of a Greek Chorus: polyphonic, critical, guiding. Their post-colonial discourse is reflected in the film’s own sound design, haunting and disruptive, like an everlasting echo you can’t escape. Halfway through the discussion, a woman becomes angry while speaking French because she sees it as the language of her ancestral oppressors, while another student questions the ethics of Macron’s restitution campaigns. These students and the people of Benin are the crux of Diop’s film. The camera lingers over them from 26’s point-of-view, showing us that they are now his main focus and hope. Clocking in at a mere 67 minutes, Dahomey left me wanting more because the runtime was too short. But it’s important to remember that we are witnessing the beginning of a metamorphosis that will extend into the seats of every spectator.
While Dahomey is visually sleek, with drops of psychedelic moonglow from the ocean that are reminiscent of Diop’s previous film Atlantics (2019), Vardanyan’s Orbita looks like a lo-fi home movie. Shot by the director on an HDR Sony camera, Orbita is a hang-out film set in an abandoned Soviet Union optical equipment factory in Yerevan. Now a backgammon factory, a thick film of sawdust covers almost everything inside. Vardanyan embraces a fly-on-the-wall approach, documenting the present-day manufactures both young and middle-aged as they whittle and engrave wood by hand and electronically. But that facade soon falters. Who really wants to spend all day working? A group of school children capture the essence of the film when they break the fourth wall on a field trip. They stare into Vardanyan’s lens with eager anticipation, ready for their close-up, playfully asking if Vardanyan is ready to go viral.
Despite their gruff, masculine appearances, the manufacturers soon match their young counterparts' energy. Beer and boredom brings out everyone’s inner performer. Gradually, the film shuffles from one goofy hangout sesh to the next like a random playlist with pop interludes that include gushing Armenian pop lyrics like “your black eyes are sad without me” that are all the more nonsensical and funny in a place like this. Meals and shots are shared. Drunken monologues sometimes lead to annoyingly conservative political views, but there’s also a sense of pathos that strikes the film. War, death, and a fair amount of “street mentality” affects everyone in the factory, allowing this sadness to seep into the film during private conversations and low budget news breaks that reminds us of the tragedies of the outside world. Glazed eyes aside, these guys are usually very much together inside chilling. The clock is always ticking. Vardanyan doesn’t provide us with any real portraiture of the manufactures as individuals–we never know anyone by their first name, for example–but he does let us hang out with them, which might be surprisingly better. Or at least more fun, if not eye-opening.