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Dahomey Movie Review

Dahomey is a 2024 Beninese documentary film directed by Mati Diop. It’s a very slow and flawed, but important and passionate movie.

26 royal treasures from Dahomey, exhibited in Paris, are returned to Benin. Diop expresses a new generation’s demands for repatriation. This movie was partly financed by France and directed by a Senegalese filmmaker, but it’s in its subject, setting and story Beninese. It’s about a very rarely discussed, but important issue – the importance of repatriation.

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This is a story about the problems stemming from colonialism, especially as it relates to the preservation of art and culture. Benin should retain all of the artifacts that originate from the then Kingdom of Dahomey, so the movie definitely got a lot of emotional resonance from the first moments where we see that art arriving to the country’s museum.

But those sequences eventually got so prolonged that they significantly halted the pace of the movie and made it feel tedious and overlong, which is an issue for a film that is just a tad over an hour long. The second half of the movie is where it reached its peak as we listen to the students’ discussions about the importance of art preservation, but also the issues that plague African countries today – the Beninese speak English and it’s very difficult for them to get back to their own culture and their own languages after decades of colonial rule.

So yes, Dahomey is at its best when tackling these crucial themes, but it is otherwise not a particularly strong movie technically speaking. I did appreciate its score, which was almost poetic in quality and quite intriguing. But that voiceover dialogue that was meant to give the film a mythological feel didn’t quite lend it that effect in my opinion. It made the film sound not as serious as intended. The directing, pacing and editing all needed to have been better here, but at least the dialogue, thematic resonance and a passionate plea for cultural preservation elevated it to a degree.

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