DAHOMEY

The return of 26 pieces of stolen art to Benin serves as an intriguing premise for Golden Bear winning doc Dahomey but the film fails to combine form and message into a compelling whole.

‘I journeyed so long in my life’, an African statue ponders in an early segment in Dahomey, as it is about to be shipped back to its home country after more than a century in spent in a French museum. Yet if there is anything blatantly obvious in Mati Diop’s remarkably short film it’s that a longer runtime would have benefitted this documentary.

The subject of the film is a timely one. The return of stolen art to its native country has been a hot button issue in France for some time now. Director Mati Diop serves up all the arguments you expect, and makes a good case for more similar art exchanges, but her message gets muddled in a curiously off-kilter approach.

Having a statue narrate chunks of the film is an artistic choice that makes sense but it reaps little dividends here. Not only does the voice-over occur mostly over a black screen, the language used is quite stilted until past the halfway point the narrator is dropped almost entirely.

From here on Diop focuses mostly on a conference with students and artist who debate the need for more art to return to Benin. The language here is much more moralistic and not helped by the fact that the casual viewer lacks the necessary background information about the deal to give back the art and if a slim amount of 26 pieces returned should be considered a humiliation to the Benin president, as is suggested multiple times.

Clocking in at less than 70 minutes, including credits, Dahomey simply needed more time to do justice to its subject and would have benefited as well from a more coherent storyline instead of the overreliance on stylistic choices.

release: 2024

director: Mati Diop

starring: Gildas Adannou, Morias Agbessi, Maryline Agbossi, Sabine Badjogoumin