Coming home: "Dahomey"

Mati Diop's Dahomey, the ruminative and searching documentary that won the Berlin Golden Bear back in February, forms an attempt to set the past and present in constructive conversation for a little over an hour. Cinematographer Joséphine Drouin-Viallard's crystalline images put us down in the Paris of November 2021, and more specifically yet in the backrooms of the Musée du quai Branly, where statues and other artefacts looted by French colonial forces during the 1892 invasion of what was then Dahomey and is now Benin are being readied for repatriation. There's something academic, even Frederick Wiseman-like about the way Diop films men in gloves dutifully boxing up and cataloguing these fragile, sometimes shopworn, hand-crafted tchotchkes. Yet she adds to the mix one giant imaginative leap. She hands the voiceover to the statues themselves, who duly report back to us as if they were hostages or soldiers captured in battle. They speak of the darkness of their confinement; of the dehumanising effects of being assigned numbers rather than names; of their anxiety over what awaits them on the other side of this handover process. Anyone who caught 2019's Atlantics on its pre-Netflix lap of the festival circuit will know Diop appears to have made it her personal mission to restore an element of mystery to the movies, even if it leads an audience to the brink of bewilderment; here, in what may well end up as 2024's foremost illustration of the magic of a fully functioning cinema, she pulls off a rare form of sorcery, transforming previously mute, inanimate objects into living, moving, politicised beings.

There's precedent in French cinema in the shape of Statues Also Die, the 1953 short by which Alain Resnais and Chris Marker initiated their respective projects on memory and cultural heritage. But Diop treads her own, more expansive path, and in so doing connects that earlier endeavour to a postcolonial, 21st century present. Her statues are watched over by state-of-the-art cooling and surveillance systems; she also carries them (and us) beyond the museum walls, to show where they came from and hear out what they might mean. In truth, this camera's rapt fascination with the processes in play - documentation, transportation, reinstallation, all hands to the pumps - would be enough to hook us even before anybody starts to consider the sociopolitical implications of this journey. Yet we arrive at the latter, too, via a further process of transference. The statues of kings and warriors become less important over the hour than the actual Beninese people who come to crowd the frame; from wondering what the statues are feeling, the film sets us to wondering what the workmen carting these items off planes and forklifts and up the gallery steps are thinking. Are they happy? Baffled? Resentful that this world wouldn't allow them the same privileges were they likewise to migrate? What good does it do a country to possess treasure if its people have no access to it? It's one of several points in Dahomey where we sense not just a shift in place but perspective, where both the eye and mind are similarly set to roam. In the final reel, Diop drops us into a debate between Beninese students, a sequence that recalls the institutional tos-and-fros of Laurent Cantet's The Class, only now with an even greater air of self-determination. Some of the speakers are impassioned, others indifferent, while others still note this offering forms part of a wider denial of their country's status ("Out of seven thousand items, they return 26"). Everything's shifting, and there's no set way of looking at (nor filming) these statues: it's good that they're back, but it's also not enough; what they are may be of less significance than what they represent; they've touched down on Beninese soil, but their ultimate fate and meaning is still very much in the air. The film is but 68 minutes, you realise, because there is no conclusion; the conversation - about our shared past, about the future - has to be ongoing. In Dahomey's closing moments, the lights go out on the artefacts, standing proud in their newly named home, but the substantial achievement of this resonant and captivating film is that the dust is never once permitted to settle.

Dahomey is now showing in selected cinemas.