Short Films

{{item.headline}}

> DETAIL INFO

Documentary Time

DAHOMEY

• Director: Mati Diop
• FRANCE, SENEGAL, BENIN / 2024 / DCP / Colour / 67’ / French, Fon, English; Turkish, English s.t.

• Screenplay: Mati Diop
• Director of Photography: Josephine Drouin Viallard
• Editing: Gabriel Gonzalez
• Music: Wally Badarou, Dean Blunt
• Producer: Eve Robin, Judith Lou Lévy, Mati Diop
• Production Co.: Les Films du Bal, Fanta Sy
• World Sales: Les Films du Losange
• Turkish Rights: MUBI

2024 Berlin Best Film

The Golden Bear at the 2024 Berlinale was given to Mati Diop’s documentary about 26 looted artworks that were returned to Benin from France in 2021. Partly narrated by one of the artworks, Dahomey explores both the legacy of colonialism and the auras surrounding the objects as a definitive factor. November, 2021. Twenty-six royal treasures of the Kingdom of Dahomey are about to leave Paris to return to their country of origin, the present-day Republic of Benin. Along with thousands of others, these artefacts were plundered by French colonial troops in 1892. But what attitude to adopt to these ancestors’ homecoming in a country that had to forge ahead in their absence? While the soul of the artefacts is liberated, debate rages among the students of the University of Abomey-Calavi. Achieving at balancing the political with the poetic in Dahomey, Mati Diop had won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2019 with Atlantique.

This film was a Meetings on the Bridge participant.