‘Dahomey’ Review: Mati Diop’s Audacious Doc Offers A Provocative View Of Modern Africa – Berlin Film Festival
deadline.comSomebody — or something — is speaking from inside a timber crate. “It’s so dark in here… a night so deep and opaque” read the subtitles; the voice is speaking in Fon, the local language of the West African country that was once called Dahomey and is now Benin.
As the slats are nailed down, the voice is increasingly muffled; we are outside, but we are inside too, watching the light disappear.
This is the transport that will take a carved statue of Behanzin, king of Dahomey when the French army invaded in 1890, from the Musee Branly in Paris to Porto-Novo, capital of Benin.
Around 7,000 works were looted from Benin in the years following the French conquest; in 2020, the French government ratified an earlier promise by President Macron to return 26 of them.
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