THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – NOT TO BE MISSED
From 1892 to 1894, Commander-in-Chief Alfred Amédée Dodds (1842-1922) led the second expedition to Dahomey, at the end of which this powerful kingdom, led by King Béhanzin, fell into the hands of France. Incidentally, during the looting of the Abomey palace, Dodds stole twenty-six royal objects, sent them to the Trocadéro Museum of Ethnography and then reinstalled them in 2000 at the Quai Branly Museum. On November 10, 2021, France solemnly returned these treasures to the Republic of Benin, formerly Dahomey, where they are temporarily on display at the presidential palace in Cotonou. A highly symbolic gesture, when experts estimate that 90% of African cultural and artistic heritage, a dizzying figure, is preserved outside Africa.
Filmmaker Mati Diop wanted to leave a mark on this moment, explaining to Worldon March 13, shortly after his film received the Golden Bear at the Berlinale on February 24: “The announcement of the restitution of works of art to Africa was like a slap in the face. The slap in the face was the realization that the question of African heritage, monopolized by European museums, had not been thought of for me.”
This Franco-Senegalese, daughter of the musician Wasis Diop and niece of the filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty (1945-1998), is part of this new generation of artists of African descent that we see emerging in France. To her credit, in particular, are two magnificent films: the medium-length film A Thousand Suns (2013), an inhabited and sensitive tribute to his uncle, poetic and political colossus of African cinema, author in particular of Touki Bouki (1973); then his first feature film, Atlantic (2019), which renews in new ways the themes of his uncle’s founding film, a work become the icon of the malaise and vitality of African youth.
The young woman signs today with Dahomey his strangest film in every sense. Short, intense, heartfelt, impure. Also indescribable: documentary without pedagogy, essay without signature, reconstruction without fiction. Let’s say a ghost film. A memory of the spirits who suffer in search of redemption. dybbuk (demon in Jewish mythology) in black earth, emerging from the buried horizons of the slave trade.
Spirit that animates it
It all begins, if you will, as in The city of the Louvre (1990), an unforgettable film by Nicolas Philibert: through the observation without commentary of meticulous handling – ballet of specialists and small hands, welcoming atmosphere, movement, packaging, protection of the relic –, the encounter of the museum and the living, of the sacred and the trivial.
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