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‘Dahomey’ Review: Mati Diop’s Exquisitely Strange Documentary Meditation on the Return of Looted Artifacts to Benin
"Atlantics" director Mati Diop's discursive, fantasy-inflected investigation into the restitution of Beninese treasures stolen by colonial France.
Inserting an inquisitive, imaginative intelligence into this key moment in the troubled timeline of post-imperial cultural politics, French-Senegalese director Mati Diop fashions her superb, short but potent hybrid doc “ Dahomey ” as a slim lever that cracks open the sealed crate of colonial history, sending a hundred of its associated erasures and injustices tumbling into the light. Diop and DP Josephine Drouin Viallard follow with unobtrusive but forensic interest the procedure of packing Gezo into his crate: the care taken not to damage the idol, the paper that protects his rear like a diaper, the complicated internal construction of the box that is designed to ensure he isn’t rattled in transit. And in the film’s final section, a university-debate-style discussion in a large hall that was staged by Diop but unfolds with spontaneous authenticity, many of the contrasting views on the issues that this paltry yet pivotal act of restitution brings up, sound like modern-day echoes of the statue’s own weariness and anger, its wariness and fear.
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