Dahomey (Mati Diop, France/Senegal/Benin, 2024), Yerevan Premiere, 10-7 17:30 House of Cinema Grand Hall
As perplexing as it is informative, this year’s Berlinale standout was Mati Diop’s non-fiction film Dahomey. A deserved winner of the Golden Bear as well, Dahomey channels the magnificence and mysticism of Diop’s debut feature Atlantique (2019) and fuses it with a documentary-logic that is rarely seen or explored in cinema. “Seen” is a significant word here, as the film is all about what happens when you put something into a box and ship it in pitch blackness to faraway lands. The way Atlantique is a folk tale about how Senegalese men transform into something else once they cross the ocean to leave their native lands — perhaps turning into spirits, or monsters even, and ultimately, always, lovers lost to the sea — Dahomey is about the transformations that occur when things are heading back “home”.
Honing in on one of the 26 royal treasures of the Kingdom of Dahomey that are about to leave Paris to return to their land of origin, the present-day Republic of Benin, Dahomey literally gives voice to a painful question in the post-colonial narrative: what do these once stolen statues mean anymore, and how will their meaning change when they return to a land both native and foreign? When the statue of King Ghézo wakes up in his shipping container — or is it his coffin? — and starts speaking, Dahomey itself transforms into a sublime monstrosity of cinema that goes straight to the jugular. King Ghézo’s uncanny voice, penned and voiced by Haitian writer Makenzy Orcel, is one of the many examples of how this film does away with traditional modes of filmmaking, to open up a different kind of cinematic space for discussion and reflection.
Take the janky score by elusive mastermind Dean Blunt, that is truly majestic in its artifice, to understand the sly dialectics at play in Dahomey. Diop never limits her scope, never chooses the easy way out, instead opting for a rhetorical frame in which every thorny side of this postcolonial dilemma can co-exist. See for instance the slow motion shots of African royalty ascending a palace to bear witness to their returned treasures, and compare that with the polemics of a student debate about the political implication of this cultural repatriation. In the hands of a lesser director these two scenes would feel like they come from two separate films, but in the case of Diop they naturally belong, perhaps because they willingly clash with each other. And then, at the end of it all, there is the ocean again, and we find ourselves amongst lost lovers and remaining yearners. It’s a tale as old as time, painfully enhanced by the colonial scars that have marked these shores for the rest of eternity.