The Musée du Quai Branly is a long ark of a building perched over a garden, whose foliage screens the museum from its busy namesake thoroughfare on the banks of the Seine. Literally overshadowed by the Eiffel Tower, it houses more than three hundred thousand pieces of art from Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas, most of them legacies of France’s colonial empire. Its opening, in 2006, was billed as an enlightened departure from the practice of exhibiting non-European works as anthropological specimens; the building’s architect, Jean Nouvel, described it as a place of spiritual regeneration, where the Western curatorial apparatus would “vanish before the sacred objects so we may enter into communion with them.” But the vibes within are less enchanting than uncanny. The cavernous main gallery is a maze of shadows and imitation mud walls, where masks look out from between oversized photographs of tropical vegetation. “I’ll never be familiar with this space,” Mati Diop said when we visited last month. “It’s like ‘The Matrix.’ ”
Diop, a French Senegalese filmmaker who won international renown for her début feature, “Atlantics,” seemed viscerally disturbed by the museum, describing its “mise en scène” as depressing, manipulative, and, switching to English, which she speaks fluently, “fucked up.” Everything was wrong, she insisted, from the folkloric condescension of the walls’ earthy colors to the crowded shelves of musical instruments in visible storage, which reminded her of bodies in a morgue. Most troubling were the grim-faced security guards, nearly all of them elderly Black men. “Psychologically, what does it do to a person to spend an entire day in a space whose violent context”—colonialism—“has been completely effaced?” Diop whispered. “And yet it’s everywhere.” She indicated a man in a dark suit beside a colorful beaded crown from the kingdom of Dahomey, now southern Benin. “The presence of these men and of this patrimony in the museum are part of the same story,” she continued. “It’s dizzying.”
Her new film, a fantastical documentary titled “Dahomey,” chronicles the return of the so-called Dahomey treasures, comprising twenty-six of the many art works that French troops seized in the eighteen-nineties while subjugating the kingdom. (A newspaper of the time crowed that the vanquished natives, whose “painted gods” had failed to defend them, “wouldn’t miss the wood.”) Dahomean sculptures were placed in anthropology museums, where they were admired by Picasso and Apollinaire. But in 2018 decades of diplomacy and activism culminated in Emmanuel Macron’s historic decision to repatriate the art works to Benin. Diop’s film follows them from the Quai Branly to a hero’s welcome in Cotonou, the country’s largest city, where they are discussed by students at a local university after an exhibition at the Presidential palace. “I cried for fifteen minutes,” one student says after seeing the show. Another declares, “What was looted more than a century ago is our soul.”
Vexing questions shadow the jubilant homecoming. What does it mean for art works to “go back” to a country that didn’t exist when they were taken? Can they have any meaning for a population alienated from their history? Or do they risk becoming mere tools of state propaganda? And what about the countless stolen objects that Western museums haven’t returned? In Diop’s otherworldly conceit, these anxieties are voiced by “26”—a defiantly posed statue of the Dahomean king Ghezo, who speaks for the treasures in a fathomless, reverberant growl. (It’s one of a trio of royal bocio, or power figures, depicting Dahomean sovereigns, and is attributed to the artists Sossa Dede and Bokossa Donvide.) “I’m torn between the fear of not being recognized by anyone and not recognizing anything,” 26 frets in Fon, the kingdom’s language, wondering, with something like survivor’s guilt, why he’s been chosen to “return to the surface of time.”
We asked a security guard where the treasures had been exhibited before their removal from the museum. Diop had filmed there, but couldn’t find where she’d set up her cameras; between the announcement of the works’ deinstallation and their flight to Benin, she’d had only two weeks to prepare. “It was like commando operations,” she recalled. The Quai Branly did not grant her request for access until Beninese officials, who wanted to record the handover for posterity, interceded on her behalf. Now, back at the scene of her cinematic heist, she gasped at the sight of a mask familiar from Chris Marker and Alain Resnais’s “Statues Also Die,” a film-essay on plundered art which France banned after its release, in 1953. “It’s her,” she said, retrieving her phone from a blue Telfar handbag to take a picture. “She’s so beautiful. She’s so beautiful.”
Diop, forty-two, is a slight, poised woman with delicate features and a coolly vigilant bearing. Often seen, much to her chagrin, as “cute,” she has wavy, center-parted hair and a beauty mark in one corner of her feathery eyebrows, with doe eyes that leaped, as we wandered the galleries, from vitrine to vitrine. She can be almost aggressively reserved; at one point, when another museumgoer blundered into her personal space, she reacted with mute pique. Yet, when she speaks about her work, it’s with a zeal that propels her outward. At times, she gesticulated so emphatically that she touched my shoulders without seeming to notice. “I need to have a sensual and physical relationship to ideas,” Diop said. “It’s hard for me to create without the idea of transmitting at the same time.”
“Dahomey” arrives in American theatres buoyed by its critical success in Europe. (Later, it will be available on the streaming platform mubi.) This February, it won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale, on the heels of Germany’s decision to transfer ownership of its Benin Bronzes to Nigeria. Its première in France, last month, reignited a moribund national debate around the issue, transforming Diop into a fixture on radio and television and landing 26 on the cover of the leftist daily Libération. “She’s already had an effect,” Felwine Sarr, a Senegalese intellectual and the co-author of the 2018 Sarr-Savoy report, which guided France’s restitution of cultural heritage to African countries, told me. “This question was framed in terms of the Western debate. ‘Do you have museums? Are you able to take care of the objects? Are you emptying Western museums?’ Now, with the film, we are hearing the voices of the people who are supposed to be mainly concerned.”
“Originally, I’d planned to write a fictional epic, the whole journey of an art work from the moment of its pillage to the moment of its restitution, which I imagined to be in the future,” Diop says of “Dahomey,” explaining that it became a documentary only after she read that the treasures were about to be returned. Before its release in France, the film premièred in Benin and Senegal, where Diop recently established a production company, punningly named Fanta Sy. (Fanta and Sy are common Senegalese names.) Restitution has become her synecdoche for creatively empowering African youth. As she put it to me, “I wanted to make a film that would restore our desire for ourselves.”
The filmmaker’s fervor is inspiring, if occasionally self-serious. Who else would speak, as she did at a recent press event, of restitution as an “irresistible march” that promises to shake the very “order of the imaginary”? Yet Diop’s work justifies such auteurial pronouncements. Hers is a yearning, nocturnal cinema of ambiguous adventures and impossible returns, shuttling between intimate loneliness—a statue’s, a has-been actor’s—and vast issues like decolonization and the migrant crisis. She made “Dahomey” after passing on multimillion-dollar projects in Hollywood. It was hard to doubt her when she said that she became a filmmaker because it was her “only possible path to liberation.”
Applause broke out on Lyon’s Rue du Premier-Film as Diop, with an obliging flourish, pulled a red cloth from the “Wall of Filmmakers” to reveal a plaque inscribed with her name. A small crowd took pictures. Thierry Frémaux, who runs the Cannes Film Festival and the Lumière Institute—where this impromptu ceremony unfolded last month—clasped her in an avuncular embrace. Soon, dozens of students, many of them Black or brown, had gathered around Diop under the street lights. A young woman with oversized glasses invited her to visit her film school. Another, in a kaffiyeh and fingerless gloves, asked the filmmaker to sign her DVD of “Atlantics.”
Diop’s début is a gothic romance, a political fable about labor and migration, and an homage to Dakar, Senegal. A group of young men helping to build a luxury tower fall victim to wage theft and resolve to seek a better life in Spain. Like thousands of others, they perish at sea. But then, impossibly, they return, possessing the bodies of the young women they left behind. Inexplicable fires and fevers strike the city; Dakar, at continental Africa’s westernmost point, is depicted as a sprawl of dust-choked motorways and ghostly beaches edging into the Atlantic’s dark expanse. In one of the final scenes, the boys force their boss to dig graves for them at a seaside cemetery. “Every time you look at the top of the tower, you’ll think of our unburied bodies at the bottom of the ocean,” one says.
Diop cast nonprofessional actors from across Dakar. Amadou Mbow crossed her path at two in the morning in the chic Almadies neighborhood, where he’d been out clubbing. “Me, I believe in destiny,” he told me; though he had never considered acting, and feared religious backlash for the sex scenes, he ended up starring as a young police detective—and occasionally interpreting for his co-star, Mama Sané, who spoke no French. The film was shot in Wolof, Senegal’s lingua franca, which Diop herself labored to understand. But her determination was a language all its own. “If she had to do the scene fifty times, we did the scene fifty times,” Mbow said, recalling an instruction to be “exhausted within an inch of your life” during an interrogation scene. The shoot went on all day: “With Mati, there is no ‘timing,’ only searching until you find.”
“Atlantics” débuted at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, where Diop was the first Black woman ever to compete as a director. Her invitation came as a shock. The film was not only a début but a genre fantasy in which nonprofessional actors delivered their lines in an African language. Yet it took home the Grand Prix. (It was subsequently picked up by Netflix, breaking the diaspora language barrier to join a Black film renaissance in the United States.) For Diop, who until then was largely known for starring in Claire Denis’s intimate father-daughter drama “35 Shots of Rum” (2008), its victory was an “LSD experience.” The vertigo was evident in her acceptance speech. Four minutes in, and not yet through with her solemn expressions of gratitude, Diop was escorted offstage by Sylvester Stallone to the tinkling strains of Camille Saint-Saëns’s “Aquarium.”
“Now we can hibernate whenever we want.”
Cartoon by Seth Fleishman
“I was impressed by this woman—so young, looking so cute and fragile—but so strong and so precise in conversation,” Frémaux recalled over drinks. We were at the institute’s café, just across from the hangar where some of the world’s first films were created. The menu specializes in wines made by filmmakers; we had Francis Ford Coppolas. “Atlantics” had a “Senegalese essence” that transcended Diop’s mixed origins, Frémaux went on, characterizing the filmmaker as “a pure artist, a pure poetess, and a great politician, too.” In 2022, she directed and narrated a campaign ad for La France Insoumise, a left-wing party. It zooms in on the faces in a movie theatre, celebrating the diversity of a country where the Lumière brothers invented cinema as we know it. “In every genre and color, we laugh, we ponder, we cry,” Diop intones.
