Dahomey

Released in 2024, Dahomey is the second feature directed by French-Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop, whose 2019 debut Atlantics won the Cannes Grand Prix. Co-produced between France, Senegal and Benin, this short documentary premiered in Competition at the 74th Berlin International Film Festival, where it won the Golden Bear. Benin selected it as its submission for Best International Feature at the 97th Academy Awards, and it also reached the Best Documentary Feature shortlist.

The film is built around the November 2021 transfer of twenty-six royal works from the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris to the Republic of Benin, a restitution agreed in 2017 after years of campaigning. Cinematographer Joséphine Drouin-Viallard films the crating, the cargo plane and the receiving museum with cool, low-light precision, while Wally Badarou and the Haitian poet Makenzy Orcel provide a voice for the artefacts themselves. A long sequence among students at the University of Abomey-Calavi opens the film into open democratic debate.

Critical reception emphasised the film's compactness (sixty-eight minutes) and the seriousness with which it treats restitution as a continuing political process rather than a closed gesture. The Cinema Eye Honors and the Lumière Award for Best Documentary followed, alongside a BAFTA nomination. Dahomey consolidated Diop's standing as one of the most attentive contemporary directors working between Europe and West Africa, and as a leading voice in the present argument about how museums hold the histories of others.