Berlinale 2024: Dahomey (Competition) | Review
Post-colonial cinema has a bright future ahead of it with Mati Diop’s new documentary, Dahomey, in competition at the Berlinale. A film that is certainly useful but which (perhaps) could have done without an overly experimental form.
Is a necessary film enough to make a good film? Mati Diop — who won the Grand Prize at Cannes in 2019 for her previous feature-length drama, Atlantique — took up the subject of France’s 2021 restitution of 26 royal treasures stolen from Benin and until then stored in a Paris museum and used it as the starting point for her latest feature-length documentary, presented in competition at this year’s Berlinale.
Was it worth the risk? Yes, without a doubt. And why? Because it’s a work that marks the reappropriation of one’s own history by a racialized person. In other words, we’re witnessing the (re)birth of a post-colonial cinema, one that knows how to film its subjects from the right distance, to grasp their questions, doubts, joys, and fears. This reappropriation culminates in a (lengthy) debate between students on the merits, or otherwise, of the restitution of works of art by ex-colonizers. These (very) lively exchanges, which punctuate much of the documentary, are the greatest strength of Dahomey.
The risk was (therefore) worth it, but (because there’s always a but) the form, deliberately conceptual at times, loses us a little. Many of the images speak for themselves, so why did we want to add a touch of aestheticism that doesn’t always add much? Perhaps it’s also a question of duration. The film runs to exactly 67 minutes, which makes it closer to a medium-length film than a feature. And you get the feeling that Mati Diop really wanted to go for a feature-length film. Dahomey would certainly have had more impact if it had been shortened: the downside is that it would then have been less well distributed. The tragedy of all short films.
