Mati Diop wins Golden Bear in Berlin for ‘Dahomey’, February 2024 (Getty)
Senegalese-French actress and director Mati Diop leaves a unique impression on audiences cannes film festival In 2019, Diop won the festival’s grand prize at the time for her film “Atlantics,” and today she is back in the spotlight after her new documentary “Dahomey” won the 2019 Golden Bear. berlin film festival During the 74th session held in February last year.
If Diop returns to his African roots in the 2019 film “Atlantics”, he will discuss the illegal immigration problem that occurs in many African countries by telling the stories of some African immigrants who died crossing the ocean. Europe, then she returns to her roots again in Dahomey, a new work that has recently begun showing in Europe, which alternates between fiction and documentary, but this time she is a woman recovering some of the looted Historians of the African Process. The artifacts were transferred to French museums during the colonial plunder of a number of African countries, including Senegal and Boyz.
Mati Diop said in her statement, which coincided with a recent screening of the documentary at the Berlin International Film Festival: “When I learned of France’s decision to seize some of the 7,000 looted treasures in Dahomey When the 26 artifacts were returned to Benin, I stopped everything I was doing and decided to make a film about the restoration.”
Dahomey (68 min/Co-production with France, Senegal and Benin) is the second documentary by Mati Diop, now considered one of the most prominent figures in the new wave of French, African and diaspora cinema . In her new work, the director blends historical fact with an imagination that almost reaches the point of poetry, in her account of the return of antiquities stolen by France from the Kingdom of Dahomey (in the southern part of the present-day Republic of Benin) in 1600 The period from 1872 to 1960 was the period of French colonialism. The looted works appeared decades ago in Paris’s Museum of Non-European Art du Quai Branly. After some African countries launched an international campaign to recover the artifacts, France agreed (albeit reluctantly) to return only 26 artifacts to Benin, an incident that occurred in November 2021 by Mati Diop and her team Waiting to register and record it.
Diop structures the documentary around the themes of life and death in the African tradition, which prompts her to invoke other contradictions related to the events she documents, such as past and present, East and West, North and South, authenticity and contemporaneity Sex etc. , all in a beautifully landscaped structure, blending the real facts of the restoration of these archaeological works and the ideas that accompanied the restoration of the pieces in a French museum in preparation for their return to the ancient kingdom of Dahomey.
Here, the fictional part enters the documentary, with Mati Diop lending his voice to one of the recovered artifacts, specifically No. 26, one of the ancient kings of the Kingdom of Dahomey. A sculpture of King Ghezo. This speaking voice is a poem written by the Haitian poet Mackenzie Auther, who put it on the tongue of the king who returned to his old kingdom, speaking with a kind of voice in the void. The sound echoed in the air as if it was coming. The story of the plundering of thousands of African artifacts from the bottom of a deep well and their passage “over the borders of his country into dark foreign countries” haunted his mind during his absence from the French warehouse. obsessed. museum and traveling to his country: “I can’t imagine seeing the sun again. Will I recognize everything I used to know? Is this the end of the journey?”
The “journey” that Mati Diop traces through her documentary footage shows some answers to the king’s return to the old kingdom, and even though Benin officials celebrated the return of some of the looted treasures, Mati Diop remains delighted. Not only overseeing the return of antiquities, but also following an academic discussion by students at the University of Calavi in Abome, Benin, in which they raised their views on the recovery of looted property, criticizing the small number of recovered works that are still in French possession. compared to something.
Mati Diop delves into the ethical debate over the legality of looted treasures that remain in the hands of looters to this day, without turning the documentary into a historical sermon or political condemnation, as she purports to. While giving voice to lost artifacts, she also leaves words to their owners, and allows young people in Benin to speak their minds themselves by recording student debates at universities, where thousands Young people lamented the incomplete restoration, and where one student repeated a sentence: “These cultural relics are the soul of a nation, without its soul, how can a nation live”?
At a press conference following the screening of “Dahomey” at the recent Berlin International Film Festival, Mati Diop responded to audience questions about her new work combining documentary and fiction: “I can “Dahomey” is a fictional documentary work, she added: “If the audience leaves the theater while they are busy watching the film, then I have succeeded in adding something new and innovative to the film. That’s my personal expectation for this movie.”
Last February, when the film “Dahomey” won the Golden Bear at the 74th Berlin Film Festival, the Senegalese-French director’s confidence was evident. Diop stood up to accept the award and said at the time: ” I’m still particularly fascinated by the impact of tracking…the looting of heritage affects the subconscious of those who have it stolen, so the question I always ask myself is: How do you become aware of the loss of something you made…without realizing you Already lost?
It is difficult not to fall into the maze into which this question of Mati Diop takes us, especially considering the vast amount of historical and archaeological treasures looted from the Arab world that still fill the halls of the most famous and largest major international organizations and storehouse. museum. Just a few weeks ago, many Sudanese museum collections appeared on the Internet at cheap and “humiliating” prices after being looted in the senseless war that raged just months earlier. Syria and other Arab countries have been looted. Are there any Arab institutions taking action to demand their return? Has any Arab film or documentary production – such as Dahomey – responded to the call to bring our stolen treasures back to the artistic and cinematic stage as Diop has?
The issue of French-Senegalese director Mati Diop raised many questions, and Diop did not forget to make his position clear while accepting the Golden Bear award in the heart of Germany. Far right: “I stand with Palestine!”
