Dahomey by Mati Diop

Bozar is giving free rein to Malian director Souleymane Cissé, who has chosen to show his films alongside Mati Diop’s Atlantique and Dahomey.
Dahomey is a captivating film by Mati Diop about the restitution of works of art to Benin, which won the Golden Bear in Berlin. In November 2021, twenty-six royal treasures from Dahomey left Paris to be repatriated to their homeland, now Benin. Along with several thousand others, these works were looted when French colonial troops invaded in 1892. But how does one respond to the return of these ancestors in a country that has had to build itself and come to terms with their absence? As the soul of the works is set free, debate rages among students at the University of Abomey Calavi.
Mati Diop was born on 22 June 1982 in Paris. Since the early 2000s, she has been building a mutant body of work that has won awards at numerous international festivals. With her first feature film Atlantique (2019), winner of the Grand Prix at the Cannes Festival, followed by Dahomey (2024), winner of the Golden Bear at the Berlinale, she has established herself as one of the leading figures of international auteur cinema and a new wave in African and diasporic cinema.