28th Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival
Dahomey
director: Mati Diop
original title: Dahomey
year: 2024
running time: 68 min.
synopsis
When French soldiers sacked the kingdom of Dahomey, located in what is now Benin, at the end of the 19th century, they appropriated thousands of artistic artifacts. In 2021, it was decided that 26 of them would be returned to their country of origin. Director Mati Diop follows their odyssey from Paris to Cotonou. The legacy of the stolen treasures comes to life first in a fanciful commentary by the King of Benin, represented by one of the statues, then during an excited debate between university students. The film, in which the ghosts of the past meet the postcolonial present of the African continent, won the main prize at the Berlin Film Festival.“France has exploited this place for centuries. You need to do more. You need to go further. You need to breathe new life into this question, and that is what I was trying to do in this film.”
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
biography
Mati Diop (1982) is an award-winning French-Senegalese filmmaker whose films polemicise about representations of Africa based on the colonial imagination. She has been trained at Le Fresnoy and the Palais de Tokyo. She won the Grand Prix at Cannes for her feature debut Atlantics (2019).more about film
| director: | Mati Diop |
| cast: | Makenzy Orcel |
| producer: | Eve Robin, Judith Lou Lévy, Mati Diop |
| script: | Mati Diop |
| photography: | Joséphine Drouin Viallard |
| editing: | Gabriel Gonzalez |
| sound: | Corneille Houssou, Nicolas Becker, Cyril Holtz |
