Dahomey: A Daring Meditation on the Painful Legacy of Looted Artifacts

There are many voices in Mati Diop’s new documentary, “Dahomey” (in theaters), and one of them belongs to Artifact No. 26. “I lost myself in my dreams, becoming one with these walls, cut off from the land of my birth as if I was dead,” it says in French, its timbre tweaked to contain both a low rumbling bass and a higher, more feminine sound. “Today, it’s me they have chosen, like their finest and most legitimate victim.”

Artifacts technically do not talk, but this imaginative element frames the rest of Diop’s film. The movie comprises mostly observational footage shot during the shipping and repatriation of 26 objects that France had looted from the kingdom of Dahomey (now Benin) during the invasion of 1892. They had resided until 2021 in Paris, in the Quai Branly museum, which houses Indigenous art and cultural items from Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas.

The return of those 26 antiquities was part of a much bigger story that began with a report on the restitution of African treasures commissioned by President Emmanuel Macron of France in 2018. That November, he announced that the items would be handed over, and that his government would study and consider giving back other objects removed from African nations without consent. He stopped short of following the report’s full recommendation, which was to return all items if asked. The move kicked off years of debate among former colonial powers in Europe, including Germany and Britain, about similar treasures in their national museums and archives.

It took years to actually give back those initial 26, which included effigies of the rulers King Behanzin and King Glélé, two thrones and four painted gates from Behanzin’s palace. “Dahomey” homes in on their fate as a way of exploring the complexity of the very act of repatriation — not for the Europeans, but for the Beninese. We watch conservators and curators carefully pack everything up. (The camera briefly takes the point of view of Artifact No. 26, with the sounds of screws going into the top of the crate and then noises of transit.) They’re then unloaded in Benin, and officials arrive for the occasion.

Most interestingly, we listen in on young Beninese as they discuss the wider repercussions in an open forum. They discuss their teachers’ failure to fully explain where these treasures went and why; they discuss their reactions to the repatriation (which range from “I feel nothing” to “I cried for 15 minutes”); they discuss whether their leaders are acting politically in taking the items back but not asking for more. They question the value of exhibiting them as art objects rather than as sacred ones, and ask why funding was not provided so that children in remote villages could see them as easily as urban children. It’s a rich conversation that rapidly lays out the controversies and bigger issues at stake.

Diop, who is French Senegalese, engages in no hand-holding in “Dahomey.” There’s no narrator telling us what and how to think. The closest we get is Artifact No. 26, talking about its own return. Such an old object (we never find out what it is) has big, poetic thoughts to share, and thus the film takes on a dreamy quality that puts the immediate debates in cultural and temporal perspective.

“I see myself so clearly through you,” Artifact No. 26 says in voice-over near the end of the film. “Within me resonates infinity.”