At the end of February, Mati Diop (Paris, 1982) became the winner of the Golden Bear at the Berlinale with
Dahomey
.
In the film, the Franco-Senegalese director documents the restitution of works of art stolen by European colonial armies in sub-Saharan Africa, following the trail of 26 ceremonial objects that France agreed to return to Benin at the will of Emmanuel Macron.
In 2017, the French president began his term by promising, in a surprising speech in Burkina Faso, the return of African heritage to its places of origin.
The promise materialized four years later with that first restitution, which was followed by others.
Diop decided to reflect it in a film narrated, in an unusual poetic gesture, by one of those works of art that were dozing in some French museum, which reflects a debate that has already become unavoidable in today's Europe.
Dahomey
will premiere at the end of the year on Filmin.
Before, Diop, who in her twenties was an actress alongside Claire Denis and later directed
Atlantique
, which won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes in 2019, answered our questions in Berlin, a few hours before the end of the festival.
More information
Journey to the African origins of stolen objects
Ask.
Is this film a response to the current debate about decolonization?
Answer.
It's a little earlier.
When I was writing the script for
Atlantique
I already had the intuition that my next project would revolve around the question of the return of works of art, only in the form of pure fiction.
More than anything, because for a long time it seemed impossible to me that something like this would happen.
It was listening to Macron in Ouagadougou in 2017 that it began to take shape.
I must say that the word restitution resonated very strongly within me...
A still from the documentary 'Dahomey'.
FANTA SY
Q. For what reason?
A.
It is the term that summarizes the work I have been doing all these years.
In 2008, at the age of 25, I decided to set up my production company in Dakar and set my first medium-length films there.
I did it out of the need to return to my African origins.
So it was an unusual gesture, because nobody wanted to go to Africa, it was not fashionable at all.
The continent continued to be a part of the world that was quite despised, even by Afro-descendants themselves, who did not feel the need to embrace that identity and assume it with pride, as has happened later, in recent years.
Q. In 2019, the
Sarr-Savoy report
, commissioned by Macron, recommended that, whenever an African country requested the restitution of a work, France accepted it if it could not prove that it was not stolen or looted.
How did you react to that report, which then generated skepticism and criticism of maximalism?
A.
I didn't expect anything to happen either and, when it did, I thought it was spectacular.
That's what steered my film toward documentary.
I felt that, as a filmmaker, it was important to take advantage of that moment.
This backfired on Macron, because he turned to two people, the historian Bénédicte Savoy and the economist Felwine Sarr, who were intellectually rigorous and of great integrity.
They took advantage of Macron's commission to turn the report into a political tool.
It was quite a feat.
The thinking that emanates from this report was crucial for me in the making of
Dahomey
.
“For years I lived in a white and elitist world.
“I wanted to reconquer my blackness, crushed by the Western.”
Q. Macron could have thrown that report in the trash and he didn't.
Why do you think he decided to apply it?
The question applies to the rest of the governments that have returned works during these years, from Germany to the Netherlands.
A.
I am able to recognize, despite being fundamentally contrary to Macron's policies, the validity of specific gestures, when they exist.
It would be absurd to throw it all away.
But, with complete sincerity, I see a rather opaque paradox in Macron's gesture.
Q. Do you think it was an attempt to maintain French cultural influence in its former colonial space?
A.
It seems obvious to me that, for some time now, France's strategy to regain a good reputation among African youth involves a series of acts that are, in essence, a strategy of seduction...
Mati Diop receives the Berlinale Golden Bear for best film for 'Dahomey', on February 24.
Andreas Rentz (Getty Images)
Q. The film reflects the stupefaction and joy that these restitutions have generated, but also the disenchantment of these African youth with the promises of Europe.
A.
I suspected there would be a debate.
If that debate existed, I wanted to be there to document it.
And, if it wasn't like that, I wanted to raise it myself.
That's what happened: I had to provoke it, because the Beninese youth did not organize spontaneously to take ownership of the matter.
I organized an audition of 12 people with different points of view, since I didn't want everyone repeating the same thing.
I filmed a debate at a university that lasted two days.
I established a list of topics that I wanted to address, because there is a legacy of self-censorship in Benin and I believe that many would have dared to criticize France, but not their own government.
Q. Your film talks about the return of tangible, but also intangible, heritage.
One participant regrets having grown up with Disney images, but not with those of Dahomey.
That is, not with his own cultural imagination, but with that of the colonizer, whether French or American.
A.
That was the crux of the matter.
If I decided to make this film it was because this issue is at the heart of my identity as a mestiza, as an Afro-descendant.
I made the decision to anchor my cinema in Dakar to reconquer my African part, my blackness, because for a long time it was very crushed by my environment, which was very Western.
I was born in Paris, I grew up in Paris, I trained in Paris and I studied art in Paris.
I developed in a white and elitist world, fed exclusively by a Western imaginary.
At one point, I began to feel anguish when I realized that the images of African history were disappearing.
Q. It happens in museums, but also in the cinema...
A.
Of course, cinema is not immune to this problem.
At the age of 18, when I began to feel the desire to dedicate myself to cinema, there were few African directors making films, apart from Abderrahmane Sissako.
The golden age of African cinema was far away, its references were dead.
I felt concern about the extinction of that imaginary.
And it was something I couldn't talk about with my white friends, not because they were idiots who were insensitive to these issues, but because they weren't affected in the same way.
And also, I admit, because I myself was not in harmony with my African part.
Cinema was a tool to reconquer that Africanity that was in me, but I also wanted to go a little further.
I wished that, at the core of world cinema, Africa existed again.
Atlantique
responded to that wish.
I wanted my first film to be shot in Dakar, in the Wolof language, and to restore a reality that already had almost no representation.
“I embody, through my own story, the meaning of hybridity.
The border, artistically and geographically, is artificial”
Q. And cinema was the only means to achieve this?
A.
Yes, for different reasons.
Visual art or acting didn't work for me.
When I understood that what I wanted to do as an artist would be eminently political, I disassociated myself from contemporary art.
It seemed to me like a medium that only spoke to itself, that was not open to the world.
On the other hand, the impact of my uncle's cinema, Djibril Diop Mambéty, was enormous, even though I did not know him directly.
His film
Touki Bouki,
which he shot in 1973 with a very low budget, was my film school.
He talks about cinema as art and as a political tool.
In 2007 I shot a film with Claire Denis,
35 Rhums,
and then I was able to become an actress, because they offered me quite a few roles.
But I made the decision to become a film director when I understood that, from that position, I could fight this battle, which prevailed over other desires I might have, such as acting, for example.
Q. Why did you make the works of art that appear in your film speak, to the point of turning one of them into the narrator of
Dahomey
?
A.
For me, these works are not mere objects: they give off a frequency, an energy, a vibration.
It's something that may have to do with my African ancestry, but not only with that.
As an artist, I am clear that works are living things that interact with their environment.
The only instruction I gave to my team, in terms of film language, was that we shoot each shot from the point of view of those works returned to Benin.
And I also wanted to make it clear to them that we were not making a documentary, but simply cinema.
I didn't want to hear the word documentary.
The idea of commissioning the narration to the Haitian writer Makenzy Orcel arose at the end of the editing process.
The text that he wrote to narrate the film goes beyond the problems of these works themselves and takes on the history of an entire town, an entire community.
It is much more complete: it covers the history of slavery and colonization, but also the more current question of the border.
Q. Precisely, you seem to believe very little in borders, whatever type they may be.
His film is between fiction and documentary, as was
Atlantique
, a portrait of a youth who dreams of escaping Dakar, which was a story tinged with documentary aspects.
A.
I like hybridity because it is a central element of my identity.
It is almost painful for me to have to answer the question: “Is your film fiction or a documentary?”
I embody, through my own story, the meaning of that hybridity.
The notion of border, artistically, culturally and geographically, seems artificial to me.
Ultimately, borders are a political notion, a problem related to power, an instrument of domination.
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