Diop, Mati

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    ‘Dahomey’: Mati Diop’s New Documentary on the Painful Legacy of Looted Artifacts

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    Mati Diop examines the fate of 26 treasures — sometimes from their point of view — looted from Benin in 1892.There are many voices in Mati Diop’s new documentary, “Dahomey” (in theaters), and one of them belongs to Artifact No. 26. “I lost myself in my dreams, becoming one with these walls, cut off from the land of my birth as if I was dead,” it says in French, its timbre tweaked to contain both a low rumbling bass and a higher, more feminine sound. “Today, it’s me they have chosen, like their finest and most legitimate victim.”Artifacts technically do not talk, but this imaginative element frames the rest of Diop’s film. The movie comprises mostly observational footage shot during the shipping and repatriation of 26 objects that France had looted from the kingdom of Dahomey (now Benin) during the invasion of 1892. They had resided until 2021 in Paris, in the Quai Branly museum, which houses Indigenous art and cultural items from Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas.The return of those 26 antiquities was part of a much bigger story that began with a report on the restitution of African treasures commissioned by President Emmanuel Macron of France in 2018. That November, he announced that the items would be handed over, and that his government would study and consider giving back other objects removed from African nations without consent. He stopped short of following the report’s full recommendation, which was to return all items if asked. The move kicked off years of debate among former colonial powers in Europe, including Germany and Britain, about similar treasures in their national museums and archives.It took years to actually give back those initial 26, which included effigies of the rulers King Behanzin and King Glélé, two thrones and four painted gates from Behanzin’s palace. “Dahomey” homes in on their fate as a way of exploring the complexity of the very act of repatriation — not for the Europeans, but for the Beninese. We watch conservators and curators carefully pack everything up. (The camera briefly takes the point of view of Artifact No. 26, with the sounds of screws going into the top of the crate and then noises of transit.) They’re then unloaded in Benin, and officials arrive for the occasion.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      At Toronto, ‘Dahomey,’ ‘Nightbitch’ and ‘Hard Truths’ Prove Highlights

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      Films by Mati Diop, Raoul Peck and Mike Leigh, among others, mesh the personal and political in engrossing, insistent ways.Each year at the Toronto International Film Festival, I travel the world virtually, moving through space and time in vivid color and in black and white. On the first day alone of this year’s event, which wraps Sunday, movies took me from Mexico to France, Benin, South Africa, the United States, England and Japan. One gift of an expansive, border-crossing festival like Toronto is that it reminds you there is far more to films than those that come out of that provincial town called Hollywood.It’s been a few rough years in the festival world, which continues to struggle with the aftershocks of the pandemic as well as the back-to-back 2023 actors and writers strikes, which left Toronto and other events with near-empty red carpets. Toronto endured another sizable hit when it lost a longtime major backer (Bell Canada). Since then, the festival has added a fleet of new sponsors and a market for buying and selling movies, a venture backed by major money from the Canadian government. That’s great news for this festival and for the enduring health of the film world, which is sustained and rejuvenated by the kinds of aesthetically adventurous, independently minded movies showcased at Toronto and other festivals.The other welcome news involves the good and the great, the provocative and the divisive movies headed your way in the coming months. Despite the usual grumblings about the program’s offerings (I’ve heard from other programmers that 2024 is a fairly weak year) and a sense that Toronto seems less vital than in the past, this year’s lineup did what it reliably does each fall. It helped restore my faith that however catastrophic the state of the movie industry seems to be, there are always filmmakers making worthy and even transcendent documentaries and narrative fiction. The forecast is often gloomy in movieland, but visionaries like Mati Diop and art-house stalwarts like Mike Leigh and Pedro Almodóvar are keeping the sky from falling.The photographer Ernest Cole in Raoul Peck’s documentary about him. Magnolia PicturesIn 2019, Diop, a Senegalese-French director born in Paris, made history at Cannes with her debut feature, “Atlantics,” when she became the first Black woman in the event’s main competition. (It won the Grand Prix, or second prize.) A dreamily haunting, haunted tale of love and loss, leaving and staying, “Atlantics” centered on a woman whose male true love leaves Senegal for Europe, a project that Diop likened to “the Odyssey of Penelope” when we spoke at Cannes. In her latest, “Dahomey” — which won top honors at the Berlin festival — Diop charts another fraught course, this time by exploring the political and philosophical questions raised when France returned 26 stolen treasures to Benin in 2019.“Dahomey” is a stunning exploration of cultural and artistic patrimony in the wake of colonialism; it’s one of the great movies of the year. (It will be at the New York Film Festival soon.) Running a richly complex, perfect 68 minutes, “Dahomey” opens in Paris and wryly announces its themes with a shot of gaudily colored Eiffel Tower souvenirs of the kind sometimes sold by African street vendors. From there, Diop skips over to the Quai Branly Museum where the treasures — which were looted in 1892 by French troops when Benin was known as Dahomey — are being packed up for their momentous trip home. By the time one of the statues began speaking in bassy, hypnotic voice-over, I was thoroughly hooked.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Festival Winners Crowd New York Film Festival Main Slate Lineup

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      Top titles from Cannes and Berlin, like Sean Baker’s “Anora” and Mati Diop’s “Dahomey,” join new work by Pedro Almodóvar, Steve McQueen and RaMell Ross.This fall’s New York Film Festival will feature celebrated prizewinners from Cannes and the Berlinale, organizers announced Tuesday, unveiling a main slate that will join new works from the filmmakers Pedro Almodóvar, Steve McQueen and RaMell Ross.The festival, which runs Sept. 27 to Oct. 14, will screen films from 24 countries and include two world premieres, five North American premieres and 17 American premieres.Ross’s film, “The Nickel Boys,” is an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel about two Black teenagers in a Jim Crow-era Florida reform school. It’s the opening-night selection. Almodóvar’s “The Room Next Door,” about a rekindled friendship between women played by Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, will be the centerpiece. And the festival will close with Steve McQueen’s “Blitz,” starring Saoirse Ronan as a working-class single mother in London who gets separated from her 9-year-old son during World War II.Winners from Cannes and the Berlin Film Festival feature heavily in the festival’s main slate lineup.Cannes imports include the Palme d’Or winner “Anora,” from Sean Baker; the Grand Prix winner “All We Imagine as Light” from Payal Kapadia; best director winner Miguel Gomes’s “Grand Tour”; the two best-director winners from the Un Certain Regard section, Roberto Minervini with “The Damned” and Rungano Nyoni with “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl”; and special prize winner “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” from Mohammad Rasoulof.Berlinale veterans playing in New York include the Golden Bear prizewinner “Dahomey,” a documentary from Mati Diop about the complicated postcolonial legacy of artifacts from the former African kingdom; Philippe Lesage’s Quebecois coming-of-age drama, “Who by Fire”; and the documentary “No Other Land,” about the destruction of West Bank villages by the Israeli military, made over five years by a Palestinian-Israeli collective.Two festival mainstays, the filmmakers Hong Sang-soo and Wang Bing, will each have two films playing this fall.Hong is bringing “By the Stream,” about a former film director, and “A Traveler’s Needs,” which won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at the Berlinale and stars Isabelle Huppert as an inexperienced French teacher in a Seoul suburb. (Hong also showed two films last year.)The second and third parts of Wang’s observational nonfiction “Youth” trilogy, titled “Youth (Hard Times)” and “Youth (Homecoming)” and focused on migrant textile workers in the Chinese district of Zhili, will also screen at the festival. The first part of the trilogy, “Youth (Spring),” was included in last year’s lineup.“The most notable thing about the films in the main slate — and in the other sections that we will announce in the coming weeks — is the degree to which they emphasize cinema’s relationship to reality,” the festival’s artistic director Dennis Lim said in a news release. “They are reminders that, in the hands of its most vital practitioners, film has the capacity to reckon with, intervene in and reimagine the world.” More

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      ‘Dahomey’ Wins Top Prize at Berlin International Film Festival

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      The documentary, directed by Mati Diop, was awarded the Golden Bear.The top prize at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival was given to “Dahomey,” a documentary by the French filmmaker Mati Diop about 26 looted artworks that were returned to Benin from France in 2021.The unconventional feature, narrated in part by the gravelly, imagined voice of one of the artworks, is a playful exploration of the legacy of colonialism and the interplay between history and identity in present-day Benin. It is Diop’s first feature since “Atlantics,” a drama about Senegalese migrants that won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival in 2019.In Diop’s acceptance speech for the prize, known as the Golden Bear, she said that “Dahomey” was part of the “collapsing wall of silence” around the need to return artworks looted by colonial powers to their original owners. “We can either get rid of the past as an imprisoning burden,” she said, “or we can take responsibility for it.”This year’s jury was led by the Kenyan Mexican actress Lupita Nyong’o and included the German director Christian Petzold, whose film “Afire” won the runner-up prize at last year’s festival in Berlin, and the Spanish director Albert Serra.Ha Seong-guk and Isabelle Huppert in “A Traveler’s Needs,” directed by Hong Sang-soo.Jeonwonsa Film CompanyThis year’s runner-up prize was presented to “A Traveler’s Needs,” by the prolific Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo, who also won awards at three of the last five editions of the event. His typically understated film stars Isabelle Huppert as an eccentric Frenchwoman who has a series of encounters in Seoul.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      At the Berlin Film Festival, Reconsidering the Power of Doubt

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      At a festival that is having an identity crisis, some of the best movies suggest that lacking certainty isn’t always a bad thing.Doubt gets a bad rap. Doubt is fussy and forgetful, whereas certainty strides around, all action and achievement. As a film critic, swift, declarative certainty is a quality I’ve learned to aspire to. And at times, to fake.But this year’s Berlin International Film Festival, which runs through Sunday, has been buffeted outside and in by political turbulence and organizational shake-ups. And so perhaps because the event itself is experiencing such uncertain times, the films made me reconsider — actually, doubt — my dismissive stance on doubt.Doubt is etched on Cillian Murphy’s hollow, striking features in Tim Mielants’s grave and moving “Small Things Like These,” which opened the festival last week. Based on a novella by Claire Keegan — whose “The Quiet Girl” was adapted into an Oscar-nominated feature in 2022 — the film is set in 1985 in the town of New Ross, Ireland, which is home to one of the Magdalene laundries, the infamously abusive church-run institutions to which pregnant, unwed women and girls were sent in shame to have their babies, who were then taken from them. In this case, the chief perpetrator of the abuse is Sister Mary (a frostbitten Emily Watson), who has clearly never had a doubt in her life. But the movie is really about Murphy’s quietly anguished coal deliveryman, Bill, and his deepening crisis of conscience.It takes considerable bravery for Bill to go against the unspoken rules of a community conspiring in silence. But as a man and a family patriarch, it is an avenue available to him. In Maryam Moghadam and Behtash Sanaeeha’s sweet and funny “My Favourite Cake,” the options are different for the Tehran-based widow Mahin (Lily Farhadpour), even if her spirit, too, is chafing against an oppressive religious social order. Her instantaneous love connection with a similarly lonely taxi driver challenges Iranian conventions in this glowingly performed rom-com that turns unnecessarily dark late on, when Mahin is punished for the act of gentle rebellion that the movie otherwise celebrates.Lily Farhadpour, left, in “My Favorite Cake,” directed by Maryam Moghadam and Behtash Sanaeeha.Hamid JanipourFor a more satisfying, if low-key, depiction of lonely social outcasts finding a spark of solace in each other, there is the Japanese director Sho Miyake’s lovely “All The Long Nights.” Mone Kamishiraishi plays Misa, whose debilitating, personality-altering PMS makes adhering to Japan’s rigid codes of politeness mortifyingly difficult. But the friendship she strikes up with a co-worker who is plagued with panic attacks becomes a source of mutual support: It will likely be one of the most touching platonic relationships of the moviegoing year.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More