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‘Cinema Can Create a Reality That Doesn’t Exist Yet’
With Dahomey, director Mati Diop found a way to film the present, past, and future all at once.
The powerfully diminutive 68-minute Dahomey, which won the top prize at the Berlinale earlier this year, threads documentary with fantasy to capture these works’ rich and complex return back to Benin. I wanted something robotic, futuristic, something that completely broke with the folkloric image that westerners have made of our traditions and our ancestors, this sort of sleepy wisdom of the African storyteller by the fire. It really invites you to experience this history, not at all in a black-and-white way — the bad guys on one side, the oppressed on the other — but in a space that’s much more complex and ambiguous and leaves each person room to examine the vestiges of the past within the present.
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