Here, There, Everywhere

Michelle Cohn explores Mati Diop’s recent film “Dahomey.”

By Michelle CohnMarch 2, 2025

• Film

• History

YOU HAVE BEEN KIDNAPPED. The captors shoved you into a dark wooden box, and you can feel, through the bumps and jerks, that you’re moving. A lot. After a few weeks or a month or a year in darkness (honestly, you’ve lost track of time at this point), your captors finally let you out of the box and immediately put you into another one. A glass box. Here, you are still. You are still in the bright lights while people ogle your face, your legs, your arms, your feet. These people look odd. Their clothing hangs awkwardly on their bodies, and their language is all phlegm and mumbling. After a few hundred years or decades or centuries (again, you’ve lost track of time), they put you in a dark wooden box again. This time, they say, you’re going back home. Home. The place you haven’t seen in what feels like many lifetimes. All the customs and traditions you grew up with, do they still exist? Is the food the same? Are any of your friends still alive? Your captors have no idea. They seal up the box with a loud, whirring machine, and you feel yourself moving again.

Such is the life of the objects in Dahomey.

Dahomey, the new film from French director Mati Diop, follows the return of 26 artifacts from France to their country of origin, the former Kingdom of Dahomey, now Benin (let’s add on the fact that your home isn’t even called the same thing as when you left). The repatriation is both an apology for the destruction caused by French colonialism and a reassertion of its power. It is a reclamation of meaningful cultural objects and a funeral for a culture that no longer exists. It is a joyful celebration and a savage insult.

Discussions around repatriation often center on how we assign value to the cultural objects in question. Is it better to keep looted art in, say, the Met or the British Museum because those institutions have a wealth of resources to preserve the materials, or is it better to have the materials be exhibited in their own country with an audience of their people? Dahomey, a pseudo-documentary that blends real-life footage with surreal elements, deepens the argument by exploring this sense of agency through a variety of different channels, offering, for example, the points of view of the objects themselves. The obdurate physicality of the artifacts she chronicles is clear enough; in one scene, we watch museum handlers carefully package them for shipment. But in this film, the objects are just as alive as the handlers that move them. Diop revels in doubleness. An artifact is both an object and a subject. A place can be both home and foreign. A documentary, we find, can be both real and mystical.

In the film, we hear the thoughts of a large wooden statue of Dahomey’s King Ghezo. The statue, standing upright, looms over the heads of the workers. His is made of dark wood and adorned with silver accessories: tassels on his arms and a solid metal band around his waist (“painted wood, metal, fibers,” notes one of the museum handlers). He stands face-forward, right arm raised in a defiant fist. He is traveling with his family: his son, King Glele, a bright orange lion-man hybrid, and his grandson King Béhanzin, a scaly, blue human-shark combination with large fishlike eyes and strong fins jutting out of his body. It is King Ghezo who narrates in an otherworldly, metallic voice (in Fon, the native language of Benin). “I’m torn between the fear of not being recognized by anyone and not recognizing anything,” he says.

“The first gesture was to make sure these artifacts stopped being objectified and could again become subjects with agency, with point of views, with subjectivity,” Diop told NPR. This is a central theme not only of Dahomey but also of Diop’s filmmaking as a whole: allowing things (or people) to speak for themselves. Her first feature, Atlantics (2019), depicts a group of young men who leave their home of Dakar and set out for Spain to find work. After the men perish at sea, we follow the story of the women they left behind. Like in Dahomey, Diop invokes the supernatural to allow feelings, and humanity, to traverse time and space: the men’s souls can return to Senegal and inhabit the bodies of the living, including the women. During her interviews, she critiqued the way the media took stories of refugees dying and turned them into abstractions and mere statistics. The media’s approach “totally avoids the existential and individual dimension of it,” she said. The reductive narratives we assign to issues, whether it’s repatriation or immigration, are not sufficient. As Diop sees it, the only way to really get to the heart of an issue is to listen to the people (or objects) involved.

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French president Emmanuel Macron said that the repatriation represented an opportunity for “the people of Africa to be able to speak their truth through their artefacts.” There are a lot of vague words there. Who, exactly, are the “people of Africa”? What is the truth? Which artifacts specifically? Macron presents the sentence in almost a linear form: subject, verb, object. The repatriation is a step forward. It moves, unequivocally it seems, toward a better future. Diop knows that is simply not the case. The conversations around these objects, and the debates around their value, are just that: conversations and debates. So that’s how she portrayed them.

The students at the University of Abomey-Calavi, who take up a large part of the film’s running time, do not agree on what speaking that truth means. They sit behind wooden desks, on windowsills, on the floor; they stand in the back; and they discuss the meaning of the repatriation. Diop told The New Yorker that she “conceives of ‘Dahomey’ as an opera with two choruses: the students, representing Africa’s future, and the treasures, trailing history’s ghosts.” Macron imagines the people of Africa as a singular voice. Diop gives us an ensemble that traverses space and time instead.

The debate room is charged with bodies and voices. A young woman sits at one of the desks in a crisp, white-collared shirt. She recounts how she stood in front of the artifacts and cried for 15 minutes. She has to raise her voice over the commotion to finish her story. To see the ingenuity of her ancestors, to see the throne she learned so much about in school, was overwhelming. But she is no Pollyanna. To return a mere 26 of 7,000? It’s insulting. A person can very well be moved by the return of the items and incensed at those still kept overseas. A man in black wire-frame glasses and a bright blue polo shirt argues that this entire charade is not for the people of Benin; it’s so France can present a positive image of itself in a world where their publicity is losing ground in Africa. Macron did this to “boost his brand,” the young man says, brushing it off as no more than a shallow PR move. And what are museums, anyway, except Western institutions? And what good is it to have statues in these museums when there are people who can’t afford food for their children, much less a trip to the capital city where these objects are held? And what good is any of this anyway when you are trying to balance real political issues with how a person feels standing in front of a statue behind glass? A woman in a sequined tank top throws her headphones behind her neck with a flourish. “All I want to say, I can’t say it. […] I’m speaking French, but I’m not French. I’m from Abomey.” You’re apologizing for stealing artifacts by giving a handful back? the students seem to demand. You spent centuries systematically destroying our culture so much so that we can’t talk about our own history in anything but the colonizer’s tongue. How are you going to apologize for that?

Diop refuses to portray one side as right and another as wrong, suggesting that the meaning of these artifacts, like the experience of postcolonial identity, resists binary categorization. Diop herself is French Senegalese and grew up in Paris as a member of the diaspora. When she speaks about how the film relates to her experience, she sees herself more in the statue of King Ghezo than she does in the students. What if no one recognizes me? What if I don’t recognize anyone? She resists a binary categorization of her own identity. She didn’t create the film to give the audience the right answer; she created it to grapple with the question.

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Diop is almost Socratic in her exploration of themes. How do you define meaning? How do you define identity? How do you define place? the documentary seems to ask. The political geographer John Agnew addressed that last element by outlining fundamental aspects of what makes a place meaningful: location, locale, and sense of place. It is the combination of a geographical coordinate (location), the social activities that take place (locale), and the emotional attachment people have (sense of place) that combine to invoke personal or cultural significance. A person hangs a picture on their wall to create a sense of ownership over the space. A neighborhood opens a shared garden to create a sense of community. A country carves the faces of its former presidents into a giant mountain in South Dakota to create a sense of patriotism (and destroy Native American land in the process). These are all placemaking activities. But there is also a fourth element of place that Agnew does not mention: the narrative of a place as seen by the outsider.

Diop knows what certain people think about Africa. She knows that the idea that African institutions cannot properly care for their artwork is in part a narrative spun by those who want to keep artifacts for themselves. The camera lingers on Beninese curators in white coats, purple latex gloves, and face masks, carefully lifting objects out of boxes and gently standing them upright. They document the condition of the artifact (“The pictorial layer presents gaps. The sculpture is stable despite cracks”) and a description of what it portrays (“This statue is a representation of a Bo, a power-figure of King Ghezo. The iron blades covering the body of the statue allude to metals, the symbol of the vodun Gû, the vodun of iron and, by extension, of war.”). She is subtly, through these small moments, changing the larger cultural perception of whether African countries can care for their own artifacts.

Yet there is a world of identity outside the walls of a museum. Toward the end of the film, Diop takes us out of the galleries and the debate room and brings us to a nightclub. A man sitting outside lets red, green, and blue lights wash over him. He scrolls on his phone, perfectly content to have a quiet moment alone. Another man speaks energetically to his friend. We can’t hear the conversation, but we see the man’s arms move in large, sweeping gestures. His beaded bracelets shake on his wrists, his eyes widening as he recounts a particularly interesting part of his tale. His friend, as friends are wont to do, merely continues eating his food, letting the first man entertain himself for a while. How do you define identity? How do you define place? I haven’t even told you half the story of this country, Diop seems to say through her visuals. It’s so much more than you’ll ever know.

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Dahomey is a rare film that, as a cultural object, is a subject of the same debates as the objects in the film. Of the many accolades it has received, including the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival, most notably it was short-listed for Best Documentary at the Oscars and selected as Senegal’s submission for Best International Feature (though it was ultimately not nominated for either).

In the eyes of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, an “international feature” is “a feature-length motion picture (over 40 minutes) produced outside the United States of America and its territories with a predominantly (more than 50%) non-English dialogue track.” It feels contradictory that a film about overturning Western colonialist structures should then be defined against those very structures to win acclaim that will be respected by those same institutions. The umbrella term of “international feature” feels akin to the category of “world music,” an overreaching encapsulation of a variety of genres whose only similarity is their otherness to the mainstream. The movie itself is a coproduction of Dakar-based company Fanta Sy and Paris-based Les Films du Bal, meaning its very creation was a marriage between colonizer and colonized, an intentional medley of cultures. This doesn’t mean that the film shouldn’t be recognized by these traditional Western governing bodies that want to see films as documentaries or narratives, international or domestic, but rather that a truer celebration of the film would be the creation of an entirely new paradigm.

Dahomey is a film that refuses a singular narrative. To hold two (or three or four) truths simultaneously is to sit with the nuance, the humanity, of the people and objects involved. This is no easy task; we tell ourselves stories in order to live, after all, and what is a museum if not a story? It is a collection of objects, dead objects, their meaning decided by the people in power. Diop lets the objects talk, feel, and tell their own stories. It is the both/and doubleness: the artifacts as objects and subjects, the students as supporters and detractors, the film itself as both a reckoning of history and picture of the future. And what a fascinating future we have in store with Diop.