Documentary on Repatriation of Looted Benin Artworks Captures Top Honor at Berlin Film Festival

Dahomey, a documentary focusing on the 2021 return to the Republic of Benin of twenty-six royal artifacts stolen by French soldiers in the nineteenth century, has won the Berlin International Film Festival’s Golden Bear. Its director, Mati Diop, who is of French and Senegalese descent, is the first Black director to win the prestigious prize. Running barely over an hour, the film beat out submissions by veteran directors Olivier Assayas and Hong Sang-soo, and triumphed over critical darlingMy Favourite Cake, by Iranian directors Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha.

Narrated from the point of view of one of the looted objects, the film limns the homeward journey of the treasures, taken from the Kingdom of Dahomey (now Benin) and long displayed at Paris’s Musée du Quai Branly–Jacques Chirac. Included in the returned trove are statues of past Dahomey rulers King Béhanzin, King Ghezo, and King Glélé, as well as the throne they once sat upon.Dahomeyshows the gleeful celebrations in Cotonou, Benin’s largest city, on the occasion of the artifacts’ return, and also documents a discussion among students at Benin’s University of Abomey-Calavi, which touches on such topics as whether the return is politically motivated and the question of why the remaining seven thousand objects pilfered by French colonizers have not been repatriated.

“I have been working on films like this for about ten years now,” Diop said at a press conference following the award’s presentation. “The restitution of works of art in a tangible sense, handed back by France—it took me a very long [time] to become fully aware of what it really signified. That’s one of the reasons why I am a filmmaker. I want to make it possible for people to understand these issues.”